Food manufacturers: Tracing the Genealogy of a Product

With traceability of the full life-cycle being vital to anything that is being manufactured in the food industry being of the utmost importance when supplying to wholesalers, supermarkets and smaller retail outlets alike, here’s a handy guide to ensure that you don’t miss anything out!

1. Start with the batch and serial number, checking that all number formats and counters are defined
2. Check that the shelf life of a product is clearly defined – in both days and hours
3. Define the batch management policy for expiry or consumption
4. Calculate the expiry and consume by dates, based on the shelf life of the product
5. Record the vendor/supplier batch number for each product
6. Define the period between inspections and plan in future inspection dates
7. Define the warning period for batch review and expiry date inspections
8. Record all properties inherited from the product master data, including batch properties and values
9. Record quality control results using actual test result values, which should be stored against batch properties
10. Ensure that all of these stages are ticked off and that everyone is aware of this at each stage!

That’s a lot of information to trace.  How best to keep track of all of this?

That’s the easy part.  There’s no need for numerous spreadsheets and reports to provide all of these processes and controls, which are ultimately completely necessary when tracing the genealogy of a product.

The system that more and more food manufacturing companies are choosing is part of an SAP certified industry solution called ProcessForce, which is a core part of the Signum Solutions Industry Edition for SAP Business One. It handles all of the above, easily.  As well as doing all of this:

• Creation of batch genealogy trees, providing a forward and backward historical view of all processes
• Creation of recall and audit reports, including lists of customers and batch recall reconciliations
• Drill downs of transactions and document traceability navigation functionality
• Creation of inventory and batch reports

Want to find out more? 

Call us on 01244 676900 or email enquiries@signum-solutions.co.uk