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Rising costs, supply chain volatility, and tougher retail expectations have made consumer packaged goods (CPG) operations harder to run with patchwork systems and manual workarounds.
What’s more, many teams are still operating reactively, with delays, bad data, and manual work creating avoidable costs, according to a study released by DOSS.
Key takeaways
- One in four CPG product launches ran behind schedule in the past 12 months.
- One in two CPG ops leaders shipped product with incorrect labeling, packaging, or documentation due to version confusion or miscommunication in the past year.
- More than one in three CPG ops leaders (36%) made a significant business decision based on data that later turned out to be outdated or incorrect in the past 12 months.
- CPG ops teams waste 7.5 days per month on tasks they say could be automated.
- 44% of CPG ops teams describe their operations posture as primarily reactive.
- The biggest delay stages were logistics and freight (33%); manufacturing or production (32%); raw material sourcing (20%); and quality control and compliance (18%).
- Packaging and labeling errors affected 13% of teams, while supplier onboarding failures hit 12%, showing that smaller workflow failures still disrupted launch prep for roughly one in eight CPG ops teams.
- Nine in 10 CPG ops teams experienced at least one operational or supply chain consequence in the past year, including canceled launches (25%); missed major retail windows (25%); stockouts at retail (22%); excess inventory sold at a discount (19%); and lost retail accounts or distribution partnerships (16%).
- Costs piled up in multiple ways. Among respondents, 26% said a delayed launch cost less than $10,000; 22% put the cost at $10,000-49,900; 17% said $50,000-99,900; and 11% reported costs of $100,000 or more. 20% said they did not know or did not track the cost. Another 34% said they were forced to take on emergency or expedited freight costs in the past 12 months, tying launch delays directly to margin pressure.
- 36% said they made a significant business decision based on data that later proved outdated or incorrect.
- The most frequently cited gaps were between CPG systems and retailer/distribution partner systems (21%); operations and sales/marketing teams (20%); and operations and product/R&D teams (17%). Another 16% said the biggest friction was between their own internal tools and platforms, meaning even teams that weren't dealing with external partners were still fighting their own stack.
- The average CPG ops team juggles four different tools to manage a single product launch end-to-end, and 29% still rely on spreadsheets as their primary workflow management tool. That's nearly as many as those using a dedicated ERP (31%).
- 39% of the average CPG ops workday was spent on manual data entry, while teams wasted 7.5 days per month on tasks they believed could be automated.
- Too much manual data entry ranked first at 32%, followed by lack of real-time visibility (21%); changes that took too long/cost too much to implement (20%); poor integration with other tools (18%); systems that did not scale with growth (16%); rigid or hard-to-customize platforms (16%); and slow or poor vendor support (14%).
- Nearly half of CPG ops teams (44%) defined their operations as reactive. Another 36% said they were balanced, while only 20% said they were primarily proactive.
- Only 43% of teams had documented SOPs covering most core workflows, while 36% had partial coverage and 21% were using outdated or nonexistent documentation.
- Nearly one-third (32%) said they'd be caught off guard and scrambling if tariffs or freight costs spiked tomorrow, and 29% weren't confident their infrastructure could scale if revenue doubled over the next 12 months.
- The teams making the most progress on operational efficiency in the past year most often focused on improving cross-functional communication (17%); automation or AI adoption (13%); SOP standardization (13%); and ERP upgrades (11%).
- Overall, 42% of teams are increasing their ops tech budget in 2026, with an average planned increase of 16%.
