Food & Beverage

The Planning Problem

Standard ERP finite schedulers were designed for discrete assembly with fixed setup times and a stable BOM. In food & beverage, that abstraction breaks the moment an allergen washout enters the picture: the duration, validation steps, and even the legal feasibility of a changeover depend on the pair of products you are transitioning between—peanut to nut-free, dairy to non-dairy, gluten-containing to gluten-free—not a single average setup time attached to the next SKU. Clean-in-place (CIP) matrices, sanitation cycles, and allergen test-and-release steps create a directed graph of transitions that generic tools rarely model. Planners compensate with master sanitation schedules and verbal rules ("Friday is always allergen day," "never run sesame after the soy line is rinsed"), which are correct until a new SKU, a regulatory update, or a contract co-pack request rewires the matrix.

Shelf-life clocks make the gap worse. Exploding a BOM is not the same as optimizing a route that propagates a finite expiration date through cooling, packaging, palletization, and warehouse hold—then onward to a customer DC with its own minimum-life-on-receipt rule. When optimization cannot see those structures, the schedule optimizes a cartoon of your supply chain. The result is inventory that ages out in the warehouse, rejected loads at customer DCs, and write-offs that never trace back to the production decision that caused them. Standard inventory modules cannot express "this batch must clear packaging within N hours of fill" or "this customer requires 80% remaining shelf life on receipt."

The predictable outcome is conservative campaign padding, last-minute packaging-line swaps, and slow-moving SKUs piling up against expiration dates. WonForge encodes allergen and CIP matrices, finite shelf-life propagation through downstream operations, packaging-line and filler synchronization, and sanitation-validation windows inside the optimization model so the plan respects the same physics, food-safety, and customer-acceptance rules your operators enforce—then searches for margin, service, and waste reduction under those constraints instead of pretending they do not exist.

Regulatory and customer-spec constraints add another layer that item-based ERPs treat as paperwork rather than scheduling logic. FDA preventive controls, USDA sanitation standards, kosher and halal segregation, and major-retailer minimum-life-on-receipt clauses all impose hard sequencing rules that should live in the feasible region—not in a planner's memory. Encoding them is what turns the schedule from a calendar of intentions into a decision system that protects margin and brand under real operating rules.

Implementation Approach

We start by codifying your allergen and sanitation matrices, shelf-life rules, and customer minimum-life-on-receipt clauses—the constraints that already live in food-safety SOPs and account spec sheets but rarely make it into your scheduling tool. Our team builds a custom model that respects those hard rules while optimizing for throughput, write-off avoidance, and packaging-line utilization. We integrate with your ERP, MES, and quality systems so every schedule is sanitation-valid, compliance-valid, and operationally executable.