Build the IT environment that keeps product change under control
The food and beverage industry is full of challenges. But there are three that I can observe again and again when talking to the leaders of their IT departments. Budgets are going down. Business demand is getting more complex. Expectations keep going up.
That combination is not easy to handle. The business needs faster change across more teams with fewer mistakes. IT is expected to deliver the environment that makes that possible without turning every program into a multi-year, high effort, heavily customized project that nobody can fund anymore.
I have spent over 27 years working with IT leaders in the industry, helping them realize solutions for the business users and that included a couple of learnings. To provide solutions, it is necessary to embrace the user’s issues, but the IT perspective has their own challenges as well. The user wants to ensure they always have quick and effort free access to exactly the information that they currently need. Then they are going to contribute to the knowledge pool with their own work. Not trivial, especially under consideration of how many changes are executed every day. It is not easy to stay on top of things. The IT perspective is trying to answer those requirements e.g., by finding the best applicable approach on information retrieval while access rights are respected and important intellectual property is not just suddenly leaked into the public. And the solution must provide a stable and performant service 24/7.
So the business with its focus on the features they require to execute their jobs is one half of the story. But IT has to look at the big picture and must ensure that a complete environment is build and maintained serving each of those users without draining budget, time and people.
This matters most when you are trying to connect the extensive and diverse community within your organization, starting from marketing, to research and development and down to manufacturing. Plus all relevant departments containing subject matter specialists that contribute as well, be it with legal guidance about regulations or recommendations of product aesthetics. There are a lot of roles that matter, each with their own wishes adding to the complexity of the challenges for IT.
The three major challenges for IT
1) Lower budgets
This is not just about the cost of software. It is the cost of implementation effort and organizational change.
Most organizations cannot get approval for three or four years of implementation time with a large team doing custom work. Those budgets are hard to justify and often impossible to secure. Stakeholders today want quick wins with reasonable cost that still hold up under real enterprise use.
What IT needs now:
- Faster time to value without cutting corners
- Less customization to build, validate and maintain
- Predictable scope, rollout milestones and outcomes
2) Higher complexity
Complexity does not always come from the process itself. A lot of it comes from people.
When an IT team tries to implement a new solution, everybody shows up with a wish list. I have seen Excel lists that capture requirements from dozens of roles. You can literally see where the writing style changes because a different person added a new section. The result is hundreds of requirements and no clean way to reconcile them.
The underlying issue is simple. Different roles have fundamentally different needs.
A formulator cares about ingredients, specifications and compliance. An artwork designer cares about packaging, claims and how the product looks on the shelf in the supermarket. Multiply that across product managers, quality, regulatory, procurement, manufacturing and marketing and the solution requirements explode.
What IT is trying to solve:
- The right experience for each role without building a one-off for each team
- One governed data and process architecture that multiple roles can use safely
- Less requirements theatre and more repeatable patterns
3) Higher expectations
This is the most human of the three and often the hardest to manage.
The business asks for everything. Sometimes as if there should be a button labelled “Do my work”. Then when they get it they complain that it feels overwhelming.
I have seen benchmarks where one vendor wins on functionality and then gets told usability is the problem. Of course it is. Twenty buttons are harder to navigate than five buttons. But the business asked for twenty.
What this means for IT:
- You have to deliver breadth and simplicity at the same time
- Adoption becomes a risk instead of an afterthought
- Good enough is never good enough
The strategy that works
When these three challenges arise, the best path forward is a practical approach that reduces implementation effort, absorbs complexity role by role and makes adoption feel safe.
In my experience, that strategy has three parts.
1) Lead with prescriptive approaches
If a solution comes commercially off the shelf with the capabilities most teams need, then implementation effort drops fast. This is not only a cost story. It is a maturity story too.
When teams adopt recommended practices, the flow of information improves. The business process gets cleaner. Rework drops. That is the win.
2) Design around roles instead of solving for all at once
The only way to survive complexity is to stop pretending one experience can serve everyone equally well. Role based design is how you avoid the Swiss army knife toolset that tries to do everything for everybody and ends up feeling like it does nothing well.
3) Implement in phases so change management stays sane
Even a great solution can fail if you force the entire organization to swallow it at once. If 50 roles will use the new solution, that adds up to hundreds of people being affected at once. Changing software for all of them at the same time is asking for chaos.
Why product information becomes an IT problem in the first place
Most food and beverage companies still manage product information across separate software solutions and repositories. It is spread in between several Enterprise applications, quality, testing and other information management tools plus data is lost somewhere in unknown shared repositories or even local drives. Under pressure teams bridge gaps with spreadsheets and email threads that quietly become unofficial systems.
The intent is practical. The outcome is predictable.
Several risks come up in an environment like this:
- Manual sharing increases inconsistency and outdated information
- Sensitive data gets duplicated in places never designed for controlled access or retention
- Audit readiness becomes reconstruction work instead of normal work
- Regulatory noncompliance risk rises as evidence and approvals drift away from decisions
This is where a unified product information environment becomes strategic. Not because it stores data in one place but because it governs change and communicates it in a controlled way.
The two integration strategies that unlock efficiency
After working with food and beverage companies for decades I have seen two integration strategies make the biggest difference. Integration of assets and integration of processes.
Integration of assets
The biggest efficiency killer is the time spent tracking down previously used data. Designers spend days searching local drives and emailing people to find original artwork files. R&D teams do the same thing looking for formulations, test specifications and simulation models. That process can take days or weeks.
When assets are integrated in a single platform the system builds relationships between digital artifacts. Someone working on artwork can find what they need by following those relationships in as few steps as possible without bothering anyone else. The same goes for formulations, test reports, specifications and manufacturing data.
This is not just about storage. The relationships between assets are mapped so users can navigate between them in just a few clicks. That accelerates innovation while preventing rework and protecting proprietary knowledge.
Integration of processes
Portfolio growth means looking at every niche you can enter. For a large enterprise this could mean making decisions about launching hundreds of new product variants and determining which ones should continue or be retired. Large companies struggle with orchestrating those activities for two main reasons.
First there are too many decision makers involved in the product lifecycle who get asked to approve various aspects of a product before launch. Second the established practices are too inflexible to accommodate change.
The solution is to break down lifecycle execution into individual process groups by discipline. This reduces dependencies that sequential approaches bring. It also accounts for the fact that every discipline has their own needs and practices for optimizing efficiency.
This concurrent design approach has a bigger impact on time to market than simple optimization of individual steps. Even within execution the solution provides flexibility to skip phases or repeat activities instead of being locked into inflexible workflow structures.
A realistic change scenario
A supplier driven substitution forces a formula update. That is normal business. The question is how the environment handles it.
I have seen this exact scenario cause a three week production delay because six different people had six different versions of the approved formula and nobody knew which one was actually validated. The cost was not just the delay. It was the trust. When manufacturing does not trust the data they start calling people instead of following the system. Then you are back to email and Excel.
In the common version the change lands in one place and spreads through people. A specification gets recreated because the approved version is hard to find. ERP is updated later. Manufacturing edits instructions. Quality stores evidence separately. Regulatory approvals live in an email thread.
Most organizations catch the drift eventually. The cost shows up as rework, delays and late stage surprises.
In the better version here is what happens. The R&D team updates the formula in the system. That change does not sit there waiting for someone to remember to tell procurement. The updated bill of materials is made subject to phase gate approval and is then pushed to ERP automatically. Manufacturing gets the updated instructions without a meeting. Compliance reviews get triggered. Marketing sees the allergen and nutrition changes before they print labels. Everything flows in between roles.
Updates move with release states and validation gates so ERP synchronization, manufacturing instruction release and regulatory sign off happen in a controlled sequence instead of by informal handoff. That is what governing product information centrally means.
What integrated lifecycle management means in practice
Integrated Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a practical way to build this environment. In plain terms it is the digital thread from idea to production that connects marketing, R&D and manufacturing so product information can be governed, reused and moved forward without losing context.
ILM connects all product information by focusing on three things. Integration of assets and processes so intellectual property can be found with minimal effort and activities execute as fast as possible. Reuse of innovation assets to accelerate finding what you need and improve brand consistency. A single source of information that acts as a repository for everything related to the product lifecycle including requirements, briefs, business case data, product design specifications, manufacturing specs and more.
For IT leaders ILM matters because it supports the strategy that works. Prescriptive capabilities that come commercially off the shelf reduce implementation effort. Role based experiences manage complexity without overwhelming users. A phased rollout model keeps organizational change manageable. Governance keeps product change traceable, secure and auditable.
I have experienced IT leaders getting pressure from all side and understand how difficult their position is. The business wants everything yesterday. Finance wants to cut your budget. You are expected to somehow make it all work. That is why we do not just sell you software and disappear. We organize around industry verticals so you work with people who understand food and beverage specifically instead of just enterprise software in general. We want to understand your problems and grow with you. When I say we have your back I mean we are in this with you.
Getting started with ILM
The approach I recommend is step by step implementation. Even by incorporating only core solution modules companies can achieve significant benefits. With every component added the total value becomes more than the sum of its parts.
The solution is highly adaptable for all types of consumer products and can adjust for various levels of complexity. It helps you identify the best approach going forward and supports you in achieving a new level of digital maturity.
The benefits include reduction of redundancies, minimizing total efforts and speeding up time to market. Your teams can accelerate product innovation, become more agile and deliver high quality sustainable products that captivate consumer attention.
Learn more
If you want to go deeper on how integration of assets and processes works in practice, how to maximize reuse of innovation assets and what a step by step implementation looks like, the e-book Integrating R&D business processes to boost the product lifecycle covers the operating model, real world challenges and the three industry trends that integrated lifecycle management (ILM) helps address.
