At a recent workshop, a partner from a global business advisory firm and I presented a case study that captures something many food and beverage manufacturers are quietly grappling with. The paradox is real: the faster your business grows, the more complex your world becomes. And the slower you move.

The irony is painful.

A leading global beverage brand came to Aras and our business advisory partner with what seemed like a straightforward problem: manage recipes. But that simple problem concealed a much larger transformation challenge. And their solution offers lessons for any F&B manufacturer facing the same pressure between the speed of innovation and portfolio complexity.

The complexity nobody talks about

When you hear “630 recipes,” it sounds manageable. Until you learn the real number: 8,000.

How does a beverage company get from 630 to 8,000 recipes? Geography and regulation. This manufacturer sells in 190 countries. Each country has different rules about what’s allowed in food and beverages. Japan prohibits taurine in energy drinks, a regulatory rule most of us have never heard of, so the company replaces it with L-carnitine. Mexico forbids caffeine in certain categories. The Middle East has entirely different ingredient approvals

Then add seasonal variation. Spring edition. Summer edition. Fall edition. Winter edition. In multiple markets. With local tweaks.

Add packaging, labeling regulations, supplier availability, and what begins as a simple beverage portfolio becomes a governance nightmare. The 2,500 finished SKUs they manage today represent thousands of unique ingredient combinations, each subject to different regulatory constraints, supplier capabilities, and market preferences.

For years, this company managed this complexity the way many do: spreadsheets, Access databases, legacy knowledge, and a lot of manual work. The data quality was poor. The speed of innovation was glacial. And the regulatory risk was constant. What they lacked was systematic configuration management, a way to govern how product variants were created, defined, tracked, and approved across markets.

The real challenge is not complexity, but speed in complexity

Here’s what changed their thinking: their competitors aren’t standing still. In the F&B industry, especially in beverages, the company that can bring a new product or variant to market fastest wins.

Our business transformation partner puts it simply: “The fastest hare wins.”

That’s not metaphorical. In a market where seasonality matters, where consumer trends shift monthly, and where competitors are constantly launching new flavors and editions, speed is survival. Traditional systems fail here. Spreadsheets, disconnected databases, manual approval workflows—none of them can deliver what’s really needed: a single source of truth for product data that connects engineering, supply chain, quality, regulatory, and compliance.

That’s where PLM comes in. But not the way most people think about it.

Democratizing PLM: from engineering tool to enterprise backbone

Traditionally, PLM is seen as an engineering system, a place where product designers, engineers, and CAD specialists manage technical data. That’s part of the story. But in the F&B world, PLM needs to do something different.

“Democratization of PLM” means moving PLM far beyond the engineering department. Into supply chain, quality management, regulatory compliance, and the supplier ecosystem. We call it that because it extends access and value far beyond the traditional engineering-only audience.

Why? Because a recipe isn’t just an engineering specification. It’s a legal document. It’s a compliance artifact. It’s a supply chain constraint. It’s a quality requirement. And it’s only useful if every part of the organization that touches it can access, understand, and act on that data quickly.

For this beverage manufacturer, that meant:

  • Recipe designers can define a base recipe and see automatically which ingredients are prohibited in which markets
  • Supply chain teams know ingredient availability across their 150 suppliers and can flag conflicts in real time
  • Quality managers have full product traceability of every ingredient decision and can audit the logic behind variant formulations
  • Regulatory teams have a governed, audit-ready record of every recipe version, approval, and market deployment
  • Suppliers can submit ingredient certifications and compliance data directly into the system

This isn’t just a convenience. It’s what makes speed actually possible.

The triangle that delivers

How do you actually build this? That’s where the partnership model matters.

“The triangle that delivers” includes three capabilities that must work together: business integrator, system integrator, and technology provider. My counterpart at our advisory partner firm and I talk about this model often.

  1. Business Integrator (a global business and technology advisory firm) is responsible for translating business strategy into process design, managing organizational change, and keeping the focus on business outcomes rather than just technology implementation
  2. System Integrator is responsible for technical architecture, connecting systems, orchestrating implementation partners, and scaling the solution
  3. Technology Provider (Aras) is providing the platform, hosting infrastructure, security, and continuity

None of these works alone. The technology provider doesn’t necessarily understand F&B regulatory requirements or organizational change management. The business integrator can’t architect systems at scale. The system integrator needs both a flexible platform and a clear business direction.

What made this transformation successful was that all three operated as one team with clear roles and accountability. Our business advisory partner drove the business strategy and process design. Aras provided a flexible, open PLM platform that could be configured to F&B-specific requirements without sacrificing enterprise scalability. And implementation partners handled the technical details.

The power of mandatory choices

Here’s something our transformation partner emphasized that often gets overlooked: flexibility can backfire.

When you implement a system as configurable as Aras Innovator®, you face choices. Many of them. You can structure your recipe hierarchy in different ways. You can define variant management rules differently. You can set up approval workflows in multiple ways.

“Mandatory choices,” as our advisory partner calls them, are not optional. You must decide how your organization will work. And those decisions shape what comes next: your flexibility, your scalability, your ability to comply.

The beverage manufacturer had to answer hard questions:

  • How much recipe variance do we want to manage?
  • Is explosive growth in variants part of our strategy, or should we focus on market penetration with existing products?
  • How do we balance centralized governance with local market autonomy?
  • Which data elements are non-negotiable (regulatory, quality), and which can be flexible (regional preferences)?
  • How tightly do we want to integrate our digital thread across supply chain, manufacturing, and quality?

These aren’t technical questions. They’re business strategy questions. And they had to be answered before any system could be designed.

The results

Three years into the transformation, the numbers tell the story:

  • +20% faster innovation speed in which new products and variants reach the market faster
  • 2x more SKUs managed, so they can now handle double the product complexity with the same operational cost
  • 25% improvement in data quality with governed data entry, standardized naming conventions, and automated validation catches errors that would have slipped through in spreadsheets
  • 100% audit readiness; when regulators ask questions, they have a complete, traceable record

That 20% speed improvement might sound small. It’s not. In an industry where optimization is already intense, where processes have been squeezed for decades, gaining 20% more speed requires real transformation, not just tweaks.

Profitability matters too. Managing 2x the SKUs without 2x the cost means growth that’s actually profitable. In an industry where expanding your portfolio usually erodes margins, that’s significant.

What this means for your organization

If you’re in F&B, or any industry managing complex, variant-rich product portfolios under regulatory pressure, this story has relevance.

The traditional approach is to accept the trade-off: either keep your portfolio simple and move fast, or expand your portfolio and accept slower innovation cycles. Companies choose one or the other and live with the consequences.

The alternative is different. Treat PLM not as a departmental tool, but as the core of your operation. Extend data governance, process discipline, and automation across every function that touches product decisions. Build partnerships where business consultants, system integrators, and technology providers work toward the same business outcomes, not just technical milestones.

It requires hard choices about how your organization operates. It demands discipline in data governance and process standardization. It takes time.

But the payoff matters. Grow faster. Compete more effectively. Move to market ahead of competitors.

As our business transformation partner put it, the fastest hare wins. In today’s F&B market, that speed comes from how well you manage complexity through a connected, governed digital thread.

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Aras Insights Digital Thread