By Chuck Fuerst Moving from an on-premise to cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS) is a giant undertaking, but with significant benefits: A cloud-based WMS will help you focus entirely on business operations rather than back-office systems. This can lower labor costs or free-up IT resources for customer-facing applications rather than managing a warehouse. Food and beverage companies have particular warehouse challenges due to the number of unique items managed, storage requirements and strict tracking and reporting regulations. This makes it even more important to carefully consider specific features when moving to a cloud-based WMS: Flexibility : Parameters for put-away and let-down logic must be in place to ensure...

Americans are a resilient bunch—for better or worse. It seems despite increased food recalls and outbreaks of contamination, consumers in the U.S. are not any more concerned over the safety of the food supply. Research firm NPD’s latest Food Safety Monitor report shows that for the period of January through August of this year, on average, 60 percent of U.S. consumers were somewhat or slightly concerned about the safety of the U.S. food supply, 25 percent were extremely or very concerned, and 15 percent were not concerned at all.  These results are pretty much consistent with previous years, says NPD. However, there are spikes when a significant recall or outbreak does occur, but the annual averages remain relatively constant...

By John Renison Enough money has been invested in border security to prevent another terrorist attack. We have seen an increase in human resources, hi-tech equipment and international agreements. Airports have implemented strong security measures and have a government agency that screens 100 percent of passengers with doubtful results. The question is - how safe is the food we eat? Is the Food and Drug Administration applying full force in regulating importers? In 2002 the FDA presented the Bio Terrorism Act and a few changes throughout the importation process which would enhance consumer safety. Each shipment that wishes to be imported into the U.S. must provide the FDA with a Prior Notice which enables consumer safety officers...

By Heather Angus-Lee “We used to have only a few employees who were specialized in food recall, but we like to go on vacation, too!” says Lindsay Palmer, supply chain coordinator at Sahale Snacks based in Seattle, WA. That bottleneck got resolved when the food processor got a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that features recall and traceability functionality. “Now anyone in our company can type in a lot number and hit the ‘trace’ button,” Palmer says. “Product traceability and recall functionality was one of the top priorities in our selection of an ERP vendor.” The requirement for traceability is often at the top of the list of criteria when food processors and distributors are looking for ERP...