Changing market demand, customer preferences, and stringent food safety protocols are the primary challenges faced by most organizations in the highly competitive baked goods sector. The carb conscious consumer’s demand for freshness and improved texture is driving innovation with introduction of novel ingredients such as new enzymes and leavening agents and flaxseed. The biscuits category is expanding through innovation.
Shifting demand means your organization must be flexible and agile to deliver innovative products timed to market needs, all while managing costs and risk.
The Adroit team helps organizations to improve their agility. By understanding your specific operational challenges, jointly crafting solutions that incorporate best practices, leverage your existing software assets, and where necessary implementing Adroit’s software solutions, you are better positioned to efficiently create and produce products in response to newer trends.
Looking Deeper – Baking Operational Challenges
As an example of understanding how process improvements can drive performance, let us review the operational challenges faced by bread bakeries.
A typical bread operation utilizes unique flour mixes that are combined with yeast, water, salt, and other ingredients typically within environmentally controlled kneading troughs.
Each trough is considered a batch processes as a subset of an overall batch production order.
A high-volume production order process may have dozens of kneading troughs. The batch recipes specify the ingredients, rise time, and kneading settings. As the trough kneading is completed it is then fed into a continuous baking operation.
The baking operations are setup as continuous processing runs within the system. The dough is fed from the kneeding troughs to dough cutters. The recipe specifies the diameter and speed of the dough cutters. From the dough cutters the cut lengths are rolled, covered in flower, etc until eventually being fed into baking molds. The molds are fed into an oven for proving and baking. The times and temperatures are specified by the recipe.
After baking, the loaves are removed from the molds and a cooling operation is completed. From there the loaves are sliced and packaged into a variety of packaging configurations. The packages are described via a packaging bill of material.
We understand every baking operation has its own unique configuration and recipes.
Environmental factors affect the baking operation.
Adroit can help you solve your production and inventory control challenges with the application of best practices, optimizing your existing systems, or through the implementation of an Adroit software solution.
Bakery Industry Solutions for Improved Operations
Whether it is crafting targeted solutions to specific operational issues or helping to improve the processes of the entire supply chain, Adroit understands the unique challenges of high-volume baked goods production.
The manufacturing process is typically a combination of front-end batch processes and continuous runs producing discrete units. As baking operations scale up and the number of unique formulations and packaging configurations increase, so does the operational management challenge.
In many cases, we can help understand how a bakery information system can be leveraged to meet key challenges, including:
- Developing cohesive sales, operations, and finance plan (SOP Planning) with accurate forecasts, production capacities, inventory inclusive of distribution pipeline and planned expiration, and financial metrics.
- Managing formulations and recipes via spreadsheets becomes unmanageable.
- Integrating insights into production including environmental factors such as humidity, temperature, and vibration
- Determining trends across batches and production runs.
- Eliminating manual and labor-intensive traceability
- Assessing bakery management software system fit to the required batch and continuous processes
- Complying with GFSI food safety schema, such as SQF, supported by independent record keeping and plans