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Twisting and turning, changing directions quickly, the Mississippi River winds down the center of the U.S. through New Orleans and out into the Gulf of Mexico. This can also describe the status of today’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. Manufacturers of food, beverage and consumer products are facing challenging times, changing consumers and the need to deliver new products to the marketplace faster than ever before. The focus of this year’s Explore will revolve around the speed of business – for reducing uncertainty and improving the lead time to respond to industry-wide change.

Key Explore Sessions

The consumer products (CP) and food & beverage (F&B) markets are experiencing change faster than ever before. If you look at how this industry operated just 10 years ago, the changes are incredible. Add in the Internet of Things (IoT) and various other advanced technologies via Industry 4.0 and you have a great deal of disruption throughout the entire value chain.

Supply chains are more complex than ever and expanding. Consumers have more ways to purchase products, and they want them customized across all sectors of consumer products. This consumer demand has now reached the food and beverage industry. Manufacturers have seen the traditional linear supply chain evolve to where current processes and business plans need to be re-engineered. This year’s Explore customer conference has a number of events geared toward the consumer product and food & beverage manufacturer to assist in managing the speed of business.

Some of the major industry-specific agenda sessions will include:

Consumer Products and Food & Beverage Industry Vertical Update
This session will highlight some of the current trends in consumer products and food & beverage today. In addition, QAD customer Oras Group, a leading provider of retail and consumer bathroom fixtures, will discuss the success of their upgrade and QAD DynaSys’ Shaun Phillips will highlight recent advancements in demand and supply chain planning (DSCP) that can assist CP and F&B companies.

Supply Chain Planning 2020
In another session, Shaun Phillips will discuss how manufacturing companies today are operating in a new world, dealing with challenges of constant changes. These changes include those in geopolitics, the exponential speed of innovation and digitization of everything, more demanding and less loyal customers, and ever-changing supply chains that are no longer chains but a network of opportunistic demand, supply and capacity entities. How does a company make their supply chain ready for 2020? In this presentation we will discuss current major events impacting global supply networks and the strategies and technologies that may be adopted to not just survive, but thrive in 2020. This session is a must for CP and F&B attendees.

The Next Generation of Demand Planning: Intelligent and Real-Time
Modern day planners are bombarded with large volumes of both historical and real-time data. Planning systems must rapidly identify trends, exclude outliers, and turn data exceptions into actionable insights, which is why supply chain planning is a natural candidate for machine learning. Thanks to the IoT, there is more real-time data providing visibility of the short-term horizon. In this presentation, we will discuss how machine learning and demand sensing change the demand planning game.

Rapid, Agile & Effective – Imperial Brands Moves to the QAD Cloud
Learn how Imperial Brands mitigated business continuity risks, simplified technical application maintenance and laid the foundation for future upgrades by moving to the QAD Cloud.

In addition to these sessions, the solutions expo, demo theater and collaboration with other QAD customers, we are planning on holding another CP and F&B roundtable discussion. Last year we kicked off the CP and F&B roundtable and had representatives from 12 different customers.

Come to the “Big Easy”

The future of the CPG market is about as clear as “The Big Muddy” that runs through New Orleans. So, come to the Crescent City with your Big ideas and get some Easy solutions at Explore 2019!

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