FOOD & BEVERAGE
The food and beverage industry operates at massive scale, serving billions of consumers every day. With this scale comes a critical need for end-to-end traceability—tracking every product from its source to the shelf. If you're focused on food safety, regulatory compliance, or meeting growing consumer demand for transparency, traceability is non-negotiable. Whether operating with a Continuous Flow model to optimize consistent inventory management, or an Agile model to emphasize real-time demand tracking, collaboration, and rapid response to market shifts, you need a flexible supply chain solution that can be tailored to fit your unique needs.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management empowers food and beverage companies to achieve real-time visibility across their supply chain. When paired with a robust shipping solution (like NMB Gateway for D365) it offers shippers the tools to combat several common industry challenges.
Supplier Diversity
Food and beverage brands often work with a wide range of suppliers—each with unique production methods, quality standards, and technological capabilities. This diversity makes it difficult to implement consistent transparency and traceability practices across the board. Managing and selecting freight services that meet the specific requirements of the food and beverage industry—such as temperature control and specialized handling—can significantly increase operational costs and reduce profit margins.
Technology Gaps
Many suppliers still rely on manual processes and outdated systems. Without real-time tracking data sharing, it becomes nearly impossible to track quality, freight charges, or sustainability performance in real-time. Manual freight invoice matching, for example, is restrictive, inefficient, error-prone, and resource-intensive, which leads to payment delays, incorrect invoices, and data discrepancies. It increases costs, risks incorrect data entry, and can ultimately result in inaccurate taxes and surcharges, negatively impacting both businesses and customers.
Tackling Seasonal Demands
Perishable items like fruits and vegetables are especially vulnerable, often leading to supply shortages, pricing volatility, and cash flow disruption throughout the year. Advanced forecasting tools and data analytics now play a key role in accurately predicting demand swings and optimizing inventory. Relying on a limited carrier network with unpredictable rates creates serious operational risks, from rising transportation costs to service delays. Without flexibility and cost visibility, businesses struggle to adapt to demand surges, leading to missed deliveries and dissatisfied customers.
KEYS TO SUCCESS
MONITOR PRODUCT MOVEMENT
An enhanced TMS solution that’s integrated within D365 provides end-to-end tracking capabilities, allowing you to monitor the exact location and condition of goods at any point during transit. This visibility is essential for perishable items that require close oversight to ensure quality and safety from farm to fork.
SUSTAINABILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Centralizing key shipping information prevents spoilage, overproduction, and unnecessary inventory movement. It significantly reduces food waste and resource consumption—enhancing sustainability across the entire supply chain.
AUTOMATE COMPLIANCE
A parcel solution in D365 can help automate and enforce regulatory compliance by tightly integrating parcel shipping workflows with food safety and logistics requirements. Proper labelling is a legal requirement for many food products—especially those with allergens, expiration dates, country-of-origin requirements, or special handling instructions.
INVENTORY ANALYTICS & FORECASTING
Every shipment represents a real-time signal of consumer demand. Shipping data provides a rich historical view of demand fluctuations over time. This includes volume trends, product-level shipment frequency, seasonality, and response to promotions. Leveraging data analytics, like those available through Microsoft’s Power BI Dashboard, helps build accurate forecasting models based on actual consumer behaviour rather than assumptions.
RECALLS AND DISRUPTIONS
In an industry where safety, compliance, and speed are paramount, the ability to act quickly and accurately during a product recall or logistics disruption can protect not only consumer health but also brand reputation and bottom-line performance. In the event of a recall, you can instantly identify which shipments included affected lots, what carriers transported them, and which customers or locations received them
RahrBSG Case Study
Driving supply chain efficiency requires assessing technology stacks, determining operational frailties, and seizing opportunities to upgrade internal shipping software. Investing in a specialized shipping solution designed to help enhance an organization’s complex supply chain is imperative—filling the functional gaps left behind by traditional ERP offerings.
For RahrBSG (a global provider of quality malt-based ingredients and solutions), investing in a robust and functionally sound ERP solution was the key, ensuring timely deliveries while supporting compliance with safety standards and minimizing costly errors throughout the packing and shipping process. It’s an ideology that has made Microsoft Dynamics 365 the cornerstone of reliable, efficient food and beverage shipping. Finding the right ISV to maximize RahrBSG’s Transportation Management System (TMS) and Less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping capabilities within D365 was paramount—but finding the right fit required deep expertise and patient user adoption.