How food and beverage manufacturers use the mPS

When we speak to our food and beverage clients, our conversations follow a few common themes.

Here are the top issues our software is used to solve.

Lack of visibility on operations

For a sector that requires plenty of administrative and regulatory oversight, visibility over production is critical.

Dealing with layers of uncompromising health and safety regulations and protocols is part of the job for food and beverage manufacturers.

But doing this properly requires discipline and clarity on how processes work, and what they must take into account at each stage to avoid contamination, product loss, or quality drop-offs.

A birds-eye view of operations is critical to ensure your production chain works as it should. So too is granular detail from specific workstations.

However, these two things were lacking for many of our customers before they adopted the mPS.

Through using the mPS, operators and managers across the plant are feeding into a centralised store of data. This makes everything much more visible for those who need to see it.

Need to check your OEE? You’ll have what you need to get it.

Meanwhile, when was the last time that machine was checked? You’ll have your last maintenance drill available in seconds.

It’s surprisingly difficult to get a snapshot of operations within a food and beverage factory without a system like this.

And this leads us to the next problem.

High waste and product losses

In food and beverage manufacturing, waste is rarely a single-point failure.

It’s the result of accumulated inefficiencies: inconsistent processes, unmonitored deviations, slow reactions, and siloed information.

In other words, it’s the natural result of underoptimization.

And unlike in other sectors, where it’s possible to work around delays, here there’s one simple fact getting in the way; once a perishable product is compromised, it’s gone.

It’s not always easy to track waste. It hides in underfilled packaging, unnecessary changeovers, overprocessing, downtime that disrupts the flow, or quality deviations that don’t trigger immediate action.

These are all unforced errors produced by a lack of systemic visibility and coordination.
So if you look at how most F&B operations are structured, waste is close to an inevitability.

A rotating workforce and tight scheduling windows make it hard to ensure consistency and follow-up.

Meanwhile, deviations noted in audits or Gemba walks may never reach those with the authority or time to act on them. And when issues recur, they’re often treated as one-offs rather than symptoms of deeper process weaknesses.

Lean manufacturing can help deal with this, but only within a system that ensures traceability, accountability, and responsiveness.

This is where the mPS comes in.

Instead of relying on analog methods and individual initiative to track observations and actions, it turns insights from the shop floor into structured improvement cycles.

Now, deviations are documented and escalated in real time. Actions are assigned, tracked, and visible across teams.

A true picture of your systems emerges, and with it, the impetus to standardize, and eliminate root causes.

It’s not about eliminating all waste. Some level will always exist due to raw material variability or changing demand. But when waste is repeated, unmeasured, and unchallenged, it becomes an invisible tax on your entire operation.

Manufacturers don’t need more data. They need usable insight, connected processes, and a system that helps people act before small problems become systemic losses.

For example, our Actions module is used by 81% of our food and beverage customers. It’s so popular precisely because it generates practical, on-the-line actions that will improve your processes.

It’s amazing how much waste you can prevent with small improvements.

Poor traceability

In food and beverage manufacturing, traceability isn’t just best practice. It’s a legal and reputational necessity.

Reconstructing the full lifecycle of a product, from raw material intake to finished goods, is what allows companies to respond to audits, avoid regulatory penalties, and, when necessary, act quickly to prevent a crisis.

Yet for many manufacturers, traceability still relies on fragmented systems: a mix of spreadsheets, paper logs, siloed databases, and undocumented knowledge. This makes tracking production excessively manual, error-prone, and slow.

When a food safety issue arises, you need to know exactly what batches were affected, which lines were running, who performed the quality check, and what corrective actions were taken. And you need that information in minutes, not hours.

A rickety, analog process just won’t cut it. And the challenge grows as operations scale.

Multi-site manufacturers face the added difficulty of standardizing traceability practices across plants, languages, and legacy systems. What one factory logs in detail, another may skip or record differently. This lack of consistency puts the entire organisation at risk when external audits or recalls occur.

The mPS addresses this by creating a single source of truth for production data.

Audits, quality checks, actions, and deviations are all logged in a centralized system. Everything is time-stamped, user-attributed, and fully traceable.

No more scrambling through folders to find the right logbook. No chasing shift supervisors for clarification. Just immediate access to a complete digital trail.

This level of traceability doesn’t just improve compliance. It increases confidence. Confidence in your processes, in your data, and in your control at every step of the chain.

In a sector where one mistake can put public health, brand reputation, and millions of euros at stake, that confidence matters.

Maintenance gaps leading to breakdowns

In food and beverage production, maintenance goes beyond simply keeping machines running. It’s about protecting the integrity of every product that goes down the line.

A breakdown in a metal detector, a miscalibrated temperature sensor, or a jammed filler head causes delays. And we know what that can mean in this industry: contaminated goods, wasted batches, or even regulatory violations.

Despite this, many factories still rely on time-based maintenance schedules or the memory of key personnel.

Done this way, maintenance is either reactive (triggered by failure) or inflexibly planned (performed whether needed or not), with little insight into how actual usage or deviations should shape intervention.

This gap creates two kinds of risk:

• Over-maintaining equipment, which consumes time and resources without real benefit
• Under-maintaining critical systems, which invites sudden breakdowns, compliance failures, or food safety hazards

And in a sector where line stoppages can spoil entire inventories, that’s a real gamble.

There’s also a lack of clear ownership and documentation.

Maintenance routines can vary by shift or technician, and knowledge is frequently undocumented.

This makes it difficult to track who did what, when, and whether it aligned with protocol, especially across multiple plants or staffing cycles.

The mPS tackles this by digitising Total Preventative Maintenance (TPM) routines in a way that connects people, machines, and data.

Maintenance tasks are scheduled based on real operating conditions, logged consistently, and visible to both shop floor and management. Teams can spot emerging issues earlier, standardise procedures across lines and sites, and eliminate the guesswork from routine upkeep.

In other words: maintenance becomes part of the factory’s learning system, and a proactive shield against risk.

Labor challenges

Digital software can’t solve this problem entirely, but manufacturing as a whole is dealing with a looming labor crisis.

Where our software helps is in ensuring workers are skilled to perform their jobs, kept motivated, and encouraged to perform.

To do this, our food and beverage clients use tools like Skill Matrix and Visual Standard; the former to manage, monitor, and enhance the capabilities of staff, the latter to ensure workers have all the correct information they need to do their jobs.

These two tools alone help solve a lot of problems on the shop floor.

It goes right back to a maxim we’re always repeating: what’s within your control should be under your control.

Using the mPS to make it clear exactly what’s expected of staff, and to know exactly what they’re capable of, is one important way to do this.

Planning chaos

This point could easily apply to many factories outside the food and beverage industry as well. However, this bites particularly hard for the food and beverage sector due to complex product lines and regulations.

Planning production without waste or confusion is very difficult in this industry. And it’s especially difficult using analog methods.

For example, think of how the perishability of your inventory affects your production downstream. The first to expire must be the first to go. But how will this requirement affect other processes?

And how can you optimally manage inventory, knowing that demand is likely to fluctuate and that your inventory can’t simply be stored away for another quarter?

Knowing in advance where your resources are committed, who has authority and capabilities in different areas, and what level of productivity you can expect will help you solve this problem.

So too can resolving complex questions of resource management and process optimization.

Regulation and compliance

The last on our list, but probably the first on the minds of anyone working in the food and beverage industry, is regulation and compliance.

With so many equally important standards to balance, this will always be a source of concern.

The least you can do is make compliance easier with tech help.

Gaining these certifications isn’t easy. But each is extremely important, and will depend on your processes working well as a whole.

As we’ve said, the mPS helps you deal with all the daily problems facing a typical food and beverage factory.

Bringing it all together, the process improvements you see will help you deliver on all major certifications, such as:

• ISO 22000
• IFS
• HACCP
• ISO 9001
• ISO 14001
• ISO 45001