A food manufacturer producing sauces and marinades had a painful secret. Every month, the warehouse would send a list of expired raw materials to the owner’s desk, and every month, the owner would wince at the number. It averaged about $19,000 a month in spoiled ingredients. That’s $228,000 a year vanishing into the trash bin.
Why things went bad before anyone noticed
The company’s old way of working was: write the production date on the box with a marker, store it on a shelf, and hope someone remembered. With 400 SKUs, “hope” is not a storage strategy. Ingredients would sit behind other ingredients for months. The purchasing officer kept buying fresh stock while perfectly good but older stock aged into oblivion in the back corner.
ERPNext Consulting took a different angle. Instead of making one person responsible for watching expiry dates, we made the system do the watching. Every batch of raw material gets a tag with an expiry date and a bin location. The system knows what’s oldest, what’s closest to expiring, and what should be used first.
What the new routine looks like on the ground
Here’s the concrete workflow that replaced the marker-pen system:
- Every incoming ingredient batch is recorded upon delivery with its production and expiry dates, tied to a specific location in the warehouse
- The system automatically sets a “use by” date that’s 45 days before the real expiry, giving the production planner a buffer to use old stock first
- Each Friday, a one-page report lists every batch expiring in the next 60 days, organized by location, so anyone can walk straight to the shelf and pull it
The results came faster than anyone expected. In the first two months, spoilage dropped by 60%. By the fourth month, the company’s loss rate had fallen to about 1.2% of stock value, down from 8%. The savings were enough to cover the entire consulting fee plus the software subscription for a year and a half.
The trick that most companies miss
The real win wasn’t the expiry tracking itself. It was fixing the purchasing policy. The system started flagging how much stock was being ordered versus how much was genuinely being used. The company discovered they were over-ordering some ingredients by nearly double, purely out of fear of running out. Better data meant they could order less, store less, and waste less. That’s the kind of insight no spreadsheet can give you, because the spreadsheet was built on the same faulty assumptions.
One last thing. Don’t hire a consultant during your busiest season and expect it to go smoothly. Wait for a reasonably calm month, get the system live, and let the routine settle before the rush hits. The team needs about two weeks of repetition before the new behavior sticks.
If your stock has an expiry date and you’re still relying on anyone’s memory, start tracking the money you lose monthly. Write it down. I promise the number will be big enough to justify a call to ERPNext Consulting.