SALINAS, CA - Every time we write a market update or a Snack Magazine feature, our editorial team and the subject are taking on a fraction of the gamble suppliers make every time they project a crop. Experience informs educated guesses, but try as we all might, there is always the catch that things could change on a dime.

In Famous Software’s recent post, Packing Optimization: How Predictive Planning Transforms Pack-Out Decisions, the company points out that vast resources of institutional knowledge can be tapped through ERP historical data.

“The system looks at the year-over-year trend for each account, identifies the week, the commodity, the volume, and the packaging configuration—and tells your production team, ahead of the EDI drop, what to pack and for whom. Not with 100 percent certainty. With 90 percent confidence based on everything that has actually happened in your operation. Your team still makes the call. The AI tells them what the data says,” the team states.

The tool is offered at a time when our industry is in constant discussion about the transition of information as many experienced veterans retire and information gaps occur.

Pointing to itself, the company shared that the operators who've run Famous Software the longest are sitting on years of order history inside their ERP, with an example many in our industry can relate to.

“...what Costco ordered in week 27, what the East Coast accounts needed the second week of July. Right now, those patterns live in one person's head, surfacing in a Thursday-morning meeting as a hunch—‘we usually see a big Costco run this time of year, let's get ahead of it.’ That knowledge is real, but it's fragile. It walks out the door when that person retires,” the post points out.

With order history, packaging requirements, and commodity data that Famous has been building into a produce-specific data infrastructure for 50 years, this is technology’s latest step bringing us ever closer to the crystal ball the produce industry is always longing for.