The ever changing trends of fashion market make cosmetic and personal care industry work on thin margins. Cosmetic market is driven by constant innovation, including the need of herbal products, new colour pallets, skin specific treatments and unique formulas based creams and gels focusing different needs. Usually cosmetic products have a very short lifespan and due to market demand manufacturers need to reformulate 25% of their products every year. For them constant product improvement is the key to stay ahead in a highly competitive market where more choice and ever greater efficacy are expected by the consumer.
Many Cosmetic manufacturing companies are still struggling with age old systems, manual processes, slow paper-based compliance procedures, and time consuming redundant data entry. Staying competitive in the personal care products industry requires reducing the manual processes that hinder productivity and automating and streamlining standard methodologies for quality and compliance processes. They require precise controls and quality management processes in order to sustain profitable success in such a competitive market. Lot traceability, QA testing, FDA compliance, and managing product formulas are all examples of the many challenges Cosmetics manufacturers face every day in order to run their business.
In this post we discuss, why cosmetic industry needs an ERP more than ever. Read on to know the compelling reasons how ERP helps personal care products manufacturing industry.
Make-up optimized Inventory levels
There is nothing more pleasing to the executive eye than accurate inventory levels. Inventory addresses the management of ingredients and raw materials from receiving to production, and the management of intermediate and finished goods products from production to shipping. Inventory records are tracked and updated automatically with the help of ERP, in terms of their QC statuses, weights, volumes, and units of measure quantities. Warehouse staff can perform material movement as per cGMP guidelines, stability checks, physical and cycle counts of inventory in stock with the help of an ERP. Management has full visibility to all inventory movements and inventory levels, based upon various inventory characteristics, including Expiry/shelf life, material where used reporting, lot controlled inventory and transactions under multiple units of measure.
Enhance lab and formulations & BOM
Keep the R&D team happy with the robust set of formulation functionality of an ERP. Scale formulations and components, target property analysis, approve workflows, formula security, version control and audit history directly from the system. In addition to defining product ingredients, product developers can simultaneous conduct intermediated, co-product and by-product management. All ingredient characteristics, including costs, are rolled up into your “` formula specification. You may now associate one or more products to one or more packaging BOMs to produce one or more finished goods. ERP offers attractive packaging options based on the need of glam and show of the fashion industry.
Get Customer-Ready Confidence by Meeting Quality Standards
Being directly associated to human body, skin and face, quality is one of the key factors for sustainment in the personal care industry. In an ERP, Quality capabilities are found throughout the production and distribution processes to ensure that received raw materials to shipped finished goods, all meet your corporate and customer’s strict quality standards. The QC team can establish all the inspection plans, sample size, checklists and QC tests. Stability testing, NC and CAPA can be conducted based on the QC tests results of delivered goods. Based on QC test results, rework of the product can be done saving complete material from being scrapped.
Brush-up Traceability and Compliance
Avoid recalls and by simply complying with GHS requirements, cGMP and other FDA requirements. Ensure federal and industry specific regulatory mandates are met with the help of an ERP leading to effective process control and making data reporting compliance simple. Now easily adjust specifications using USDA, Genesis and user defined product databases to ensure label claims are being met. ERP generates compliant FDA nutritional fact panels and compliant SDS reports.
You may quickly track and trace suspected materials from receiving through shipping and shipping back to receiving, or anywhere within your production premises in order to meet product traceability and recall mandates. ERP also maintains an audit trail of key transactional history for audits or FDA review.
Cleanse-off Wastage & Losses with Cost-Analysis
Running on the edge of extremely thin margins, cosmetic manufacturers are constantly under the threat of being thrown out of the market. With an ERP, they can conduct “what-if” cost analysis and expected Vs. actual analysis to keep a tab on all costs. ERP’s Costing responsibly considers the costs of raw materials and consumables as well as projected costs associated with fixed setup charges, scalable labor, tiered labor, markups, margins and losses. Once the finance is under control the management is able to make better decisions with the help of various dashboards and reports.
Beautify Production and Planning
The planning and scheduling are crucial in load balancing based upon seasonal demand. ERP makes your production fall in line with its efficient planning and scheduling options keeping the last minute chaos under the limit. ERP optimizes procurement of raw materials, allowing you to maintain optimum inventory levels while minimizing carrying costs. It enables detailed, consolidated view of supply and demand and also creates purchase orders based upon demand from planned orders, sales orders and forecasts. What to produce, how much and when to produce becomes crystal clear with the help of ERP’s master scheduling. From the variety of production processes like mix, blend, fill, and assemble, to convert raw materials into intermediates and finished goods, including co-products and by-products, ERP makes everything a cake walk. Be it make-to-order, make-to-stock or mixed-mode manufacturing environment, ERP can adapt any kind of industry specific conditions.
Conclusion
For a sensitive as well as a dynamic industry like cosmetic and personal care, ERP comes as the rescue. Cosmetics & personal care manufacturers can better manage all the complexities unique to the industry with today’s ERP systems to optimize their overall performance. But not any ERP, instead one built specifically keeping in mind their unique needs and processes is what seals the deal. One such ERP is BatchMaster ERP for Cosmetics & personal Care- built with 30 years of experience of serving numerous cosmetics manufacturers makes it a perfect one. Contact us to know more about it.
