Is it possible for AI to make your business more profitable?

Most manufacturers and food producers know that paperwork is expensive, but very few know exactly how expensive it really is. Across more than fifty operations assessed by our specialist partner, the hidden cost of manual traceability and compliance administration has consistently ranged from R150 000 to R400 000 per year, with the initial investment typically recovered within six to nine months.

Those are documented savings, not estimates on a slide. Independent research on Western Cape food manufacturers places the average annual cost of manual traceability administration at R85 000, with some operations spending as much as R150 000, and that figure captures only the routine admin load. It does not account for what happens when something goes wrong.

The asymmetric risk lies in compliance failures and incidents. A failed food safety audit can result in fines ranging from R50 000 to R200 000, along with the loss of certifications and restricted market access. A contamination event without adequate traceability can result in losses of R2 million to R4 million or more. The most instructive local example remains the Tiger Brands Listeria outbreak of 2017 and 2018.

The contamination was traced to a single meat processing plant, but because batch-level traceability was insufficient to isolate the affected product, the company was forced to recall its entire ready-to-eat processed meat range. The result was the closure of a business that previously held 36 per cent of the market, and the subsequent closure of 190 other meat factories caught in the supply chain fallout. The difference between recalling a single batch and recalling an entire product line is not merely a technical detail. It is often the difference between a business surviving an incident and not.

Because brands are built on profitability, not just design, CORE Brand Management has partnered with a specialist in data and manufacturing to turn paper-based processes into digital traceability and decision-ready information, so management can see where money is really being made or lost and act faster and with more confidence.

A useful way to test this is to look at everyday questions that drain time in finance and operations: how long it takes to prepare year-end information for your accountant, how quickly you can access decision-critical data, and how many hours are spent each week moving information between emails, spreadsheets and systems. If two or more of those questions are difficult to answer, money is almost certainly being lost due to missing, late, or inaccurate data.

These are not just technology problems, but foundation problems in how information flows through your business, which is why software and AI only work once information has been organised and standardised.

Once those foundations are in place, we recommend and support implementing digital traceability: replacing manual batch records and paper checklists with simple screen-based forms, consolidating scattered spreadsheets into a single structured system, and creating a single source of truth for production, quality, and compliance data. The mechanism that makes this work is the electronic batch record.

A digital log of every step, every measurement and every sign-off in the production process, linked directly to the batch it describes. In plants where this has been done properly, admin time linked to traceability and compliance has dropped significantly, often by around 70%, and audit preparation that previously took days can be completed in hours. A Stellenbosch dairy reduced its traceability test time from four hours to eight minutes after digitising its records.

The impact goes beyond labour-saving: reliable, real-time data makes it easier to respond to incidents, prove compliance to auditors and export customers and see trends that were previously buried in paperwork, while preparing the business to use AI in a practical, grounded way because the underlying information is clean enough to trust.

For businesses that export or plan to do so, the stakes are higher still. EU legislation makes batch-level digital traceability a legal requirement for market access, not a competitive advantage. South African exporters are required to retain five years of export documentation under SARS rules, a requirement that is straightforward with a digital system and quietly punishing with paper files. Since April 2025, SARS has tightened its electronic customs requirements, making complete invoice and shipment data mandatory in digital declarations.

Documentation gaps now trigger inspections that create port delays and storage charges before goods leave the country. Missing phytosanitary certificates can stop shipments entirely; missing origin documentation can nullify preferential tariff rates and result in unexpected import duties for the foreign buyer. A business that cannot produce clean, linked, retrievable records is not export-ready, regardless of the quality of its product.

Our specialist partner is currently working with dairy, meat, bakery, beverage and fresh produce manufacturers, where digital traceability reduces admin load, simplifies audits, protects reputations in the event of an incident and creates a stronger basis for growth.

For accounting and auditing firms, there is a clear opportunity here. You already see the symptoms of poor information in late records, reconciliations that take too long and clients who cannot explain where their money is really going, as well as the audit penalty risk, the recall liability and the export compliance gap that most clients do not quantify.

By helping them understand the cost of poor information and the returns they can achieve by improving their information foundations, you are not only improving the quality of financial reporting but also strengthening the business they rely on.