Freshening up the food industry with Catch Weight Management

⇨ Catch Weight is crucial in the food industry for managing pricing of products with variable weights, necessitating technological innovations to streamline processes.

⇨ SAP's Catch Weight Management (CWM) solution simplifies tracking and pricing of goods across the supply chain using both Inventory and Catch Weight units of measure.

⇨ By enhancing inventory visibility and operational efficiency, SAP CWM helps organizations avoid costly scenarios, such as out-of-stock items, while improving accuracy in production planning and freight costs.

Catch Weight is an important element of the food industry designed to help organizations manage the pricing of individual products with variable weights sent to the buyer, particularly for products that vary in size such as meats, seafood, cheese, fruits and vegetables. Catch Weight has significant implications on a food manufacturer’s time and resources so companies should have technological innovations to offer a helping hand.

Catch Weight’s complexity dates back to the traditional manual way of managing it, which is labor-intensive, error-prone and costly. Food companies should have a sustainable solution that can save organizations money and time. For this reason, SAP has created its own Catch Weight Management (CWM) solution designed to help companies in the food industry manage the pricing of products that are typically bought and sold in bulk and priced by their weight.

In a recent whitepaper, PwC explored how as part of its strive to help organizations with this work, SAP is making it simpler to track the weight of goods and confirm that this number stays associated with the item throughout the supply chain journey.

SAP’s Catch Weight Management Solution

SAP can assist by providing out-of-the-box functionality to cater to the complex requirements of the food industry with the Catch Weight Management solution. With it, companies can manage products in two different units of measurement:

• Inventory unit (base unit of measure (UoM)): Referring to the unit of measure in which the product is sold, received, transferred, picked and shipped.
• Catch Weight unit (parallel UoM): Referring to the unit by which the item is weighed and invoiced.

In addition to facilitating this important differentiation, SAP Catch Weight Management can help track products through various functions and processes within the supply chain – purchasing, production, quality management, sales and distribution in the two units of measurement independent of each other.

It can also help users benefit from the available functions for costing and inventory management as well as integration with financial accounting and controlling. This can help users map the requirements from the valuation area.

By improving inventory visibility and providing base and parallel units of measure across the supply chain, Catch Weight Management can help avoid costly and time-consuming scenarios such as out-of-stock items, improving picking accuracy as it uses handling units with both quantities.

These use cases show that even in highly specific business areas such as Catch Weight, technological solutions can play a vital role. Improving weight calculation to reduce freight costs and unloading while also enhancing production planning accuracy to boost yield is something many organizations can benefit from.