How NetSuite can help
Here are business areas where NetSuite and Baker Tilly can help growing F&B companies streamline their operations, gain efficiencies, and improve overall profitability.
Revenue reporting
This is a major concern for F&B companies that need accurate data on how their products are being received by the marketplace. With a unified ERP like NetSuite, they can quickly determine how a specific product is doing, what channels it’s selling in, and any areas where it may be lagging. Then, the company can drill down into the details and make good go-to-market decisions based on which SKUs are and aren’t moving.
Using the ERP’s dashboards, companies can see what their big sellers are and which SKUs are lagging. They can also compare this against historical data without having to sift through Excel spreadsheets to find that information. It’s all right at their fingertips.
Bill of materials (BOM)
Creating a BOM manually takes significant time and effort. With NetSuite, buyers can create a complete BOM with just a few keyboard clicks, check on how the allocation is performing, and adjust as needed.
This capability is also valuable for recipe management, where being able to quickly adjust ingredients on BOMs saves a lot of time and manual effort. The ERP also makes it very easy to track, view historical data, and meet regulatory requirements for traceability purposes.
On the financial side, recipe BOMs provide insights into the actual cost of the recipe, identifies any areas of improvement, and ensures the right amount of overhead was applied for each recipe that was made into a saleable product.
These granular details help F&B companies better manage their financial operations and go well beyond what any spreadsheet-based or basic accounting system can offer.
Optimized procurement
Streamlined BOM and recipe management also help companies optimize their procurement functions. When this data is readily available to buyers, they can place orders with suppliers and then rest easy knowing that they’ll have the right quantities on-hand. This helps keep production lines moving or in case of a product outage, a substitute source is always available.
For example, a cereal manufacturer can substitute an alternate type of oats but still maintain the expected product consistency and quality.
Demand and supply forecasting
This is one area that’s still handled manually in the mid-market F&B space, where NetSuite delivers high value in the form of more accurate predictions of both demand and supply. This is especially important for companies that make perishable products or items that must meet stringent FDA requirements and keep close tabs on the time from receipt to production and packing to sale.
With NetSuite, those and other determinations can be made based on the F&B company’s own historical data, which informs the overall demand and supply forecasting process. This, in turn, allows companies to remove most of the heavy lifting from that process while also better controlling their overall costs.
Chargebacks, allowances, and coupons
These are common in the F&B industry and all three can be difficult to manage using manual processes and spreadsheets. Chargebacks happen when retailers return goods in exchange for a refund. Allowances can be off invoice or charged back based on customer agreements. Coupons also come into play and require any distributor, or end customer promos, to be accounted for and handled properly.
Companies must be able to track these events and estimate the actual, related expenses of chargebacks, allowances, and coupons for a specific period.
Delays also have to be factored in because the related documentation may not surface until 90 days post-sale. With NetSuite, companies can easily track and report these elements across multiple channels—wholesale, retail, and online—to ensure accurate revenue reporting on every product line.
Co-packer management
This is another area where F&B companies can easily lose visibility, mainly because food packing or other activities are being managed offsite by a third-party provider. Each of those providers offers a set amount of capacity, and F&B companies need tools that help them effectively assess that capacity and allocate the work to the co-packers that can handle it. If no co-packers are available, organizations must find secondary options that can manage the work.
With NetSuite, companies can use their data to identify such needs early and make good decisions based off of that information.
Segregation of duties
Smaller organizations may not be too concerned with segregation of duties, but as they grow, take on investors, and prepare for audits, this capability becomes table stakes.
For example, regulators want to know that the data they’re reviewing hasn’t been manipulated by a user that randomly accessed the system, and investors want assurances that the financial data they’re assessing is reliable and accurate.
NetSuite’s role-based access controls and robust approval workflows ensure that only authorized individuals have the necessary permissions to perform specific tasks, preventing unauthorized access and mitigating the risk of fraud.
