The food and beverage industry poses some unique challenges and the ever-changing customer demands necessitate that companies respond to them in real-time while ensuring flexibility and control. Governments are exerting considerable influence on the industry with tighter controls and compliance with health and safety regulations to safeguard public health and security . Intense competition and globalization add further to the challenges in managing the already diminishing margins related to the manufacture and distribution of your products. Then there are the unique inventory control and special handling challenges pertaining to perishable goods and dated products which require controlled temperature environments and must be picked according to expiration dates. In short, the Food & Beverage supply chains are being forced to look at completely re-engineering the way they meet customer needs and deliver unparalleled quality, product selection, and service.

Exactus offers the Aware supply chain execution solution to help you surmount these challenges by improving supply chain visibility and accuracy, decreasing logistics costs, reducing inventory levels and improving performance while maintaining flexibility and tight control over your operations. To meet the complexity of your fulfillment and changing process requirements, such key features as cross-docking, directed picking, bulk and consolidated picking, task interleaving and ASN processing are available as part of our solution. The auto-alert feature lets you proactively manage events and handle exceptions. Notifications can be sent to appropriate managers and trading partners when a scheduled event or exception occurs.

Product expiration management and tracking can be easily handled with such features as date/lot tracking and rotation and RFID functionality, and movement of products according to expiration date can be carried out using various strategies such as LEFO, LIFO, FIFO, and FEFO.

Increasingly, retailers are demanding more from suppliers and distributors. In order to meet customer-specific requirements, Aware lets you easily manage such value-added services as private labeling, kitting and co-packing. In terms of standards compliance, Awares advanced RFID capabilities let you handle stringent product identification standards such as Wal-Marts NAPCCI (North American Pallet, Carton and Case Initiative) as well comply with product lifecycle lineage traceability laws such as COOL (Country of Origin Labeling).

The Advanced features of Aware can help companies in the Food & Beverage industry achieve improvements in fulfillment efficiency and accuracy, better client retention, increase in market share and improved profitability.