The fish and seafood industry continues to experience steady market demand due to consumer awareness of the category’s health benefits. Market growth is attributed to buying preferences for healthy, natural, and organic fish and seafood produced in sustainable economic conditions. Product innovation continues including plant based seafood, breading innovations, international flavors, and convenience supported by grab-and-go snacks.
As consumer lifestyle preferences continue to drive demand, market growth in the fish and seafood industry is expected to continue in the short and long term.
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. Our team works to understand your specific operational challenges, jointly crafting solutions that incorporate best practices, leverage your existing software assets, and where necessary implementing Adroit’s software solutions.
Working with Adroit, you are better positioned to efficiently create and produce products in response to newer trends.
Looking Deeper – Fish and Seafood Operational Challenges
As an example of understanding how process improvements can drive performance, let us review the operational challenges faced by Fish and Seafood processors.
Fish and seafood processing is a complex category, marked by many supply chain activities and processes necessary to quickly and safely produce food products from the time the fish and seafood are harvested until shipped for distribution and consumption.
Fish processing software can play a role in improving every step of supply chain activity.
Complex Operations
Seafood includes fish, shellfish, seaweed, and other edible aquatic life. Seafood is highly perishable and temperature sensitive.
Effective processing operations mitigate microbial loads through a variety of techniques including chilling or freezing, salting, smoking, freeze-drying, irradiation, or vacuum packing. If the seafood is harvested far from shore, then preprocessing on the vessel is necessary to preserve the catch until offloading on the shore.
Preprocessing could include keeping the seafood alive or chilling. An alternative to wild catch is aquaculture in which fish are kept alive in fishponds, wells, or cages.
Following harvesting the seafood is transferred to processing plants. The seafood is received into the plant with individual containers properly labeled with lot, serial #, sku, and catch weight qty. The lot record contains the catch date, vessel, etc. It is important to note that each tub or container has a different weight and that standard ERP systems typically cannot handle the catch weights.
Production orders dictate the necessary processing steps. Fish processing may be a fractionating process in which multiple products are derived from a single fish species. Thus the ERP system must accommodate co-products and by-products. Final seafood products can include whole fish, filleted fish, fish sticks, fish oil, or fish meal.
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.
Fish and Seafood Solutions for Improved Operations
At Adroit, we take the time to understand your operations. We understand that key challenges for a growing fish and seafood processor can include:
- A challenge to develop a cohesive sales, operations, and finance plan (SOP Planning) with accurate forecasts, production capacities, inventory inclusive of distribution pipeline, and financial metrics. Production is often limited by supply, so the forecasting challenge is inverted from typical demand driven forecasts.
- The importance of understanding unique software drivers for the industry including catch weight, container serialization, and co-products and by-products
- The need for integrating and certifying GFSI / food safety schemas to current processes and ensuring that HACCP plans including temperature and foreign object checks are enforced and recorded in the software.
- Requirements for standardized processes to support employee training and repeatability across different formulations and locations
- Improved insight into yield and areas of loss.
- Transformation from batch spreadsheets to an online integrated system with formulation and recipe capabilities
- More integrated traceability
- Real-time insight into yields and costs per unit
- A need to establish and integrate laboratory information management systems (LIMS).
- Requirements to proactively manage by-products and waste to support sustainability
Fishing industry software and other key business systems all have a role in helping to modernize operations. When properly aligned with overall strategy, these systems help manage complex traceability and record keeping mandates.
Adroit brings industry experience to each engagement and takes the time to understand the specifics of your fish and seafood operations. We can help you migrate the spreadsheet-based recipes and formulas into a formal system, and help you to get control of your costs, yields, production, and inventory challenges.