Infor said it plans to deliver a range of enhancements to Infor M3, including the development of Infor M3 Fresh Food Planner (FFP) – a new application for companies that produce ultra-fresh food with shelf-life counted in days rather than weeks and months.
Infor M3 FFP is designed to deliver a new way of planning fresh food production.
The new concept of “forecast pacing” provides detailed insight into current and historical flow of orders – down to the hourly level.
This helps manufacturers refine forecasts within the tool.
Combined with the speed of reporting, this enables an efficient daily planning process.
Unlike traditional planning solutions, FFP is designed to run directly on-top of the operational enterprise resource planning database providing instant access to live data about current demand, supply and stock levels.
Using FFP, the planner can adjust forecasted demand and plan production within the same application, which delivers control over a rapidly changing situation for fresh food manufacturers.
“Fresh food manufacturers are continually caught between being out of stock and having stock that is past its shelf-life,” said product director Patrik Sjoberg.
“The window of maximum opportunity is based on having just the right stock at just the right time. We believe that in this context, accuracy in predicting stock needs more precisely increases revenue while reducing waste and write offs. Consequently, accurate demand planning is absolutely critical.”
“In addition, retailers want a greater share of shelf-life to remain when the product is shipped from the manufacturer. This narrows the time-window for planning and production even more,” he said.
“The ongoing demand for customer choice results in growing portfolios and means that a manufacturer has less time to plan each product. Simply put, fresh food manufacturers have to be the fastest, most agile business they possibly can be and we believe that, to do that, technology such as the FFP is going to be a source of real competitive advantage.”
