I once watched a routine packaging change take weeks to fully work its way through the business. The change itself was straightforward: an FDA-driven labeling update that required revised ingredient statements and nutritional panels across our product line. The kind of thing that happens in food manufacturing. You hear it’s coming and the room sighs.
But getting that change reflected accurately across every system that needed it (the ERP, the regulatory platform, the art tracking system, the packaging specs) required extra meetings and coordination across planning, art production, regulatory, marketing, supply chain, and finance. Easily ten to fifteen people, for a change that had nothing to do with how we made the product.
The hardest part wasn’t the change itself. It was figuring out which packaging components were even affected. There were no attributes in any system that told you which component carried the ingredient statement or the nutritional panel. Was it the wrapper? The carton? The lid? The base? A hangtag? An insert? We relied on component naming conventions squeezed into thirty-character descriptions, then cross-referenced the art tracking system to visually confirm what lived where. Meanwhile, the ERP had the BOMs and inventory of current packaging versions, and the regulatory system had the new data, but none of these systems talked to each other.
We likely missed components on the first pass. In that environment, you almost always did.
It Builds Quietly
Over more than twenty years at a single food manufacturer, I watched this kind of environment develop gradually, not all at once, but decision by decision. It never starts as a problem. It starts as a series of reasonable solutions.
R&D needs formulation management, so they adopt a PLM. Regulatory and Quality need compliance tracking and a way to generate and manage label copy: ingredient statements, allergen callouts, nutritional panels. Packaging engineering needs a way to manage components and specs. Art tracking and approval live in their own system, often relying on manual entry of component numbers with no direct link to the systems generating part numbers or finished goods SKUs. Assembly specifications end up on a shared drive, where file names (not systems) are expected to connect the dots for the plant floor.
Each decision makes sense. Each one helps a team do their job. But no one is looking at the whole picture, and the gaps between systems quietly become the most fragile places in the operation.
When something changes in one system (a formula revision, a component substitution, a packaging update), someone must manually carry that information everywhere else. Not because systems failed, but because they were never designed to talk to each other.
When something changes, how confident are you that every system reflects that change accurately and on time?
72% of F&B executives cite poor data connectivity across systems as a factor impacting their operations.
– Hexagon, 2025 (survey of 400 senior executives)
Growth is What Breaks It
Disconnected systems can function when the business is stable and predictable. But growth (new channels, new customers, higher volume, more SKUs) introduces variability, and variability demands clarity.
We had a lot of finished goods SKUs, and that number increased significantly when we expanded into food, drug, and mass retail. A task that was already hard to manage in our original channels got harder in a margin-tight environment that introduced more SKUs, more customer requirements, and more packaging variations. The same labeling change that once affected dozens of components now affected hundreds.
Questions take longer to answer. Changes require more coordination. Confidence depends less on what the systems show and more on whether the right people are available to piece things together. That’s not a technology failure. It’s a design gap that gets wider with every layer of complexity the business adds.
It’s a Connection Problem
I want to be clear: no ERP does everything, and no manufacturer should expect it to. This isn’t about having fewer systems. It’s about having systems that are connected in a way that doesn’t rely on constant human coordination to keep them aligned.
When that coordination breaks down (and eventually it does), the result isn’t dramatic. It’s a component printed with outdated copy. A team that hesitates because they’re not sure which version of a spec is current. A missed component that nobody caught on the first pass because there was no way to query across systems for where a specific copy element lived.
The systems still work. But control has been replaced by confirmation, and visibility depends on effort rather than design.
It’s a connection problem that shows up as a control problem. And the longer it goes unaddressed, the harder it becomes to unwind.
