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Streamline Daily Tasks for Formulated Product Teams with Centric v7.6

4 MIN READ

Formulated products such as food and beverage or cosmetics and personal care items are extremely complex to produce, generating reams of data and requiring teams to be agile and collaborative in order to get products to market on time.

With so much product-related information that is constantly changing, everyday activities can become overwhelming. Teams that should be coming up with exciting product concepts or driving new product introductions to the next stage get stuck on routine daily tasks such as data entry, collecting supplier responses and entering changes to ingredients that affect multiple products. Time is wasted, teams are frustrated, and product timelines suffer.
Centric PLM™ v7.6 has been developed in partnership with customers involved in both the food and beverage and cosmetics and personal care industries. Taking into account customer requests and the special requirements of teams handling formulated products, v7.6 introduces new tools and features that are designed to make work life easier.

Save Time Searching with Flexible Product Hierarchies

Trying to find and work with product information is difficult if it has been forced into the wrong structure. Centric PLM v7.6 introduces flexible product hierarchies for both individual items (raw materials) and formulated products that contain multiple ingredients, such as food recipes and cosmetics. Product hierarchies can now be created to exactly match the way your business works, with as many levels, subtypes and products as needed.

Your teams need to be able to find what they need, fast. Hierarchies are set up to be quick and easy to navigate, with an intuitive interface that allows users to follow ‘breadcrumbs’ from one level to the next. Products don’t have to be in a hierarchy – they can also sit outside it. Raw materials and formulated products can easily be moved around, added to hierarchies and taken out of them.

Centric PLM’s new flexible hierarchies can be replicated quickly to save time. If your business happens to have a common type of product hierarchy structure, simply copy it with all of its security permissions to create a ‘sibling’ product hierarchy with all of the same structure built in, then make adjustments as needed.

Enhance Supplier Collaboration

Following on from the introduction of supplier requests in v7.5, 7.6 makes it possible to collate and compare supplier responses in one place. Rather than spending time searching through emails and messages, downloading files and communicating individually with suppliers, teams can use the supplier portal to work more efficiently.

The ability to gather supplier responses in one place makes it easier to make cost-effective decisions, quickly communicate with suppliers to request clarification or move forward, and collaborate more closely with suppliers to co-create products.

Control Access with Enhanced Security

Removing distracting, unfinished or confidential product information from view in product hierarchies keeps teams focused on their particular tasks and protects sensitive information.

Centric PLM v7.6 introduces enhanced security permissions that make it easy to control exactly what users see from different levels in the product hierarchy, build accountability and protect product information by making files confidential. Adding or removing team or user access is simple, intuitive and easy to change with a couple of clicks.

Automate Nutrient Data Entry to Boost Efficiency

Manually entering data from lists or spreadsheets into PLM is a waste of precious time for your teams and increases the risk of errors that cause costs and delays. V7.6 introduces the ability to import nutrient data into Centric PLM with a simple copy/paste action to create ingredient label datasheets.

Save time by enabling teams to quickly transfer large amounts of nutrient data rather than working line by line, ensuring accurate information is entered into ingredient label datasheets while reducing errors.

Save Time and Reduce Errors with Mass Replacement

As supply chain issues and raw material price inflation continue to push companies to make swift ingredient substitutions and develop alternatives to previously reliable choices, your teams need to be able to make changes quickly. Having to manually identify and alter each product affected by an ingredient change can be very time-consuming and is naturally fraught with the risk of missing details or making mistakes.

Centric PLM v7.6 brings in a mass replace function that enables teams to automatically identify recipe BOMs affected by a change in a formulated material, or product BOMs affected by a change in an ingredient. With complete control over which BOMs are updated, teams can replace line items at once across BOMs to cut time spent searching for affected products and entering data.

In a competitive and unpredictable marketplace, teams working to produce complex formulated products with stringent compliance, safety and regulatory requirements can’t afford to spend time looking for information and doing tedious data entry. Making small changes to the way individual users spend their time at work every day drives greater efficiency and work satisfaction across the whole organization, ultimately impacting the ability of your teams to focus on achieving strategic objectives.

With these enhancements and more, Centric PLM v7.6 aims to cut out repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Contact us to see what it can do for your teams every day.