Forecasting on a Moving Production Line

Forecasting on a Moving Production Line 

If you run FP&A for a food or beverage manufacturer, 2026 has probably felt less like planning and more like triage. Input costs won’t sit still, shoppers are trading down, and the price increases that used to protect margin are running out of road. Forbes called it plainly at the start of the year: margin preservation is the defining trend of 2026, with leading F&B businesses moving past top-line gross margin to scrutinise profitability plant by plant, channel by channel, SKU by SKU. RSM’s April 2026 food and beverage outlook adds the sting in the tail: pricing power is fading just as costs keep climbing, which is why productivity, not price, is now doing the heavy lifting on margin. 

Layer trade policy on top and the picture gets busier still. The National Association of Manufacturers found that 73.1% of manufacturers now rank trade uncertainty as their single biggest challenge, and 80.3% have paid tariffs on imported inputs since the start of 2025. For a beverage business sourcing packaging from three continents, or a snack manufacturer watching cocoa and edible-oil prices swing by the week, that isn’t a footnote to the forecast. It is the forecast. 

And yet the tools most FP&A teams are forecasting with haven’t caught up. The FP&A Trends Group’s 2025 benchmarks found that only 17% of organisations run a fully driver-based model, even though 77% of the ones that do rate their forecasts as good or great. Meanwhile 46% of FP&A time still goes on collecting and validating data rather than analysing it, and almost a third of teams need more than ten days to produce a forecast at all. In a multi-plant manufacturing business, that data usually starts life on the production floor: separate demand plans, separate cost rolls, separate spreadsheets that all have to be argued back into agreement before anyone can talk about margin. 

This is precisely the gap Mercur by Pacera was built to close. Instead of a sales and operations plan and a financial forecast that live in different files and never quite agree, Mercur runs driver-based planning on one set of templates, so production volume and the financial number are the same figure rather than two that need reconciling every month. When a tariff or a cocoa price shock hits, Mercur’s scenario simulation builds a full profit and loss, balance sheet and cash view in a fraction of the time a rebuilt spreadsheet model takes – and because it draws on live ERP transaction detail (a feature shared with AARO Planning), the numbers stay traceable back to source, not just fast. 

The results speak for themselves, with the usual caveat that these are Pacera’s own published figures rather than independent audits. Our client AJ Products, running 20+ subsidiaries across 19 markets, replaced a planning process built on hundreds of Excel files and cut planning man-hours by 32%. In Pacera’s own user research found 94% of our FP&A clients say they have more time for analysis and monitoring rather than data wrangling. That’s the trade FP&A leaders in this sector are actually looking for in 2026: less time reconciling last month, more time steering next quarter. 

Up next in Part 2: why the financial close is where food and beverage manufacturers lose the days they can least afford to lose — and what a modern close actually looks like. 

Ready to see what driver-based planning looks like on your own production and cost data? Talk to Pacera about a demo of Mercur and AARO Planning →