SAP Recipe Development will accelerate the product development process and its manufacturing at every stage of the lifecycle.

How to Develop a Perfect Product Recipe with SAP

Today, almost every stage of food production leads to food waste. The study showed that one of the main reasons ingredients don't turn into products on store shelves is human error; it accounts for 10.9% of all industrial waste. Higher are only the losses associated with changes in recipes and the production process - 13%. Also, 8.7% of losses are related to defective products.

Incorrect nutrient counts and production parameters, error in equipment settings, unoptimized recipes for future products, and lots of manual labor - all these lead to low production efficiency and high costs, meanwhile also complicating regulatory compliance. However, these are just a few issues that manufacturers have to address every day.

Recipe Development and Product Manufacturing Pitfalls

Spoiler: they are common to almost every production stage.

Creation of an “ideal” recipe

Formula development for a future product includes taking into account all the ingredients and nutrients, its chemical and physical properties, temperature, and even the packaging in which the product will be stored. In other words, when creating a recipe, it is necessary to take into account many factors that affect the product that will go to store shelves.

Optimization of formulas and recipes

It is practically impossible to create a recipe that can be considered “correct” in all respects: the one that would take into account all factors. So the manufacturer needs to make more than one change in the composition of the final product and its production process before the final version will be approved.

The more recipes, the harder is controlling

Manufacturers need to constantly invent new products, as well as make changes to existing recipes to improve them. That's why the number of available formulas and recipes always grows, and it is quite challenging to control all the data associated with them.

The cost of a mistake

Despite the desire of businesses to automate production processes, including the processes associated with recipe development and the production stage, a large amount of manual labor is still the stone that drags down performance indicators.

And this is not only about speed and performance but also errors associated with the human factor. In the pharmaceutical, food, and chemical industries, such errors can lead to a range of issues, from financial damage due to a spoiled batch of products to lawsuits due to the harm made to customers' health.

Different regions — different laws

If the company's products are manufactured for the local market, the business does need to comply with the regulatory requirements of different countries. The thing to do is to set everything up under the legislation of one country, whether the talk is about harmonizing products, labeling, or packaging.

However, if you run a business that sells products to different regions and has affiliates in different countries, you have to be aware of the legal and regulatory requirements of each region.

Keep Your Products Safe and Competitive with SAP PLM Recipe Development

SAP Recipe Development (SAP RD) is an add-on for SAP S/4HANA used by the food, chemical, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries to develop new formulas, product recipes, and labels. Its main goal is to support a product's life cycle, from the stage of its development to production and labeling.

How does SAP RD help your business?

The main features of the solution include:

• creation, visual representation, and modification of all available recipes;
• display of formulas in the table format for the convenience of entering the starting substances and their alternatives;
• the ability to display and change several recipes at the same time;
• formula optimization;
• history of all actions and any changes made to the recipe;
• determination of the parameters of the production process - temperature, pressure in the boiler, etc.;
• determination of requirements for equipment and production processes;
• calculation of the required amount of ingredients, nutrients, as well as production costs;
• consistency check;
• uploading data for one or more recipes;
• synchronization of recipes, production specifications, and master recipes.
  
  

One of the first companies to implement SAP RD in their production was Nestlé. The company has started its partnership with SAP in recipe development and management in 2003, and today it has access to the latest capabilities in target-based recipe development:

• recording specifications for ingredients and packaging;
• development and management of recipes for manufacturing of semi-finished products and finished products;
• access to regulatory data for compliance purposes;
• the function of transferring the recipe to production, etc.

SAP RD helps Nestlé to manage over 700,000 specifications and 400,000 recipes.

Leverage LeverX Project Experience for Your Business Success

LeverX experts will not just implement SAP PLM Recipe Development into your system but will also help you in refining the system to make it suit your business needs. We will also develop additional utilities for the efficient operation of the solution.

Thus, in cooperation with a global manufacturer of consumer goods, our team not only configured the SAP RD system in accordance with the requirements of the customer but also developed a utility for loading and migrating data.

We set up additional automation tools for data provision, as well as improved the standard integration of processes between SAP RD and SAP Master Data Governance, finalized individual application tabs, and customized them according to the requirements of another customer — one of the leading manufacturers of dairy products.

LeverX's project experience includes collaboration with a leading US tobacco manufacturer. In the course of the project, our team set up new product development and production planning processes, integrated SAP RD with a product quality control system, implemented the migration of recipes from SAP Recipe Management to SAP RD, and implemented a system of regulatory reporting.

If you have any questions about how SAP PLM Recipe Development works and how it can benefit your business, feel free to contact our experts. We will be happy to assist you!