When Excel Can No Longer Keep Up With Your Production

Most food companies start out using Excel to manage recipes and production planning. It works fine as long as volume is low and recipes are stable. But as production grows and recipes become more complex, the spreadsheet starts to creak - and it becomes a risk rather than a tool.

The challenge: variable raw materials, seasonality and ingredient substitution

Food production differs from many other forms of manufacturing in that raw materials are rarely constant. Seasonal variation means the same recipe may need adjusting depending on the quality or availability of a raw material. A supplier may run out of an ingredient, and a substitute has to be found - without compromising taste, texture or nutritional content.

In a spreadsheet, this means every adjustment has to be updated manually, often by a single employee who has the recipe “in their head”. It’s fragile, time-consuming, and errors can creep in without anyone noticing until the product is finished.

How an ERP system handles recipe management and batch sizes

An ERP system with built-in recipe management makes it possible to define recipes as structured data instead of cells in a spreadsheet. This means that:

• Ingredient substitutions can be made in one place and automatically flow through to production planning and purchasing.
• Batch sizes can be scaled up or down without anyone having to recalculate by hand.
• Recipe versioning makes it possible to see which version of a recipe was used in a given production run - important if questions later arise about a specific batch.

Production planning and avoiding bottlenecks

When recipes and raw material needs are linked directly to the production plan, it becomes possible to see bottlenecks before they occur - for example if a particular machine is booked for several production runs at once, or if a critical raw material isn’t in stock for the planned production date. This makes it possible to proactively rearrange the plan, instead of discovering the problem once production is already underway.

OEE and equipment monitoring as part of the same system

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a measure of how effectively your production equipment is actually being used - accounting for downtime, speed loss and quality defects. When data on equipment performance is linked to the same system as production planning, it becomes possible to see connections that would otherwise be hard to spot: for example, whether certain recipes or batch sizes systematically cause more waste or downtime than others.

From order to finished product: one connected flow

The benefit of bringing recipe management, production planning and equipment monitoring together in one system is that the entire flow from order to finished product becomes transparent. Instead of data being scattered across spreadsheets, machine logs and the memory of experienced employees, it sits in one place - and is available to production, quality and management alike.

If your company has grown to a point where Excel requires more maintenance than it provides value, that’s a sign that a dedicated system for recipe and batch management will pay for itself quickly.