Safety, Traceability in Food Manufacturing

The best part of all of this is that pulling that report should take only a few clicks in an integrated system, as opposed to the several days or weeks of research you’d invest with disjoined systems and manual processes.

Best if Used By

To ensure product safety, an effective expiration date management system is also essential. The more products, ingredients, and customers you have, the more difficult it is for Mike to keep track of shelf lives, particularly if you have customers with different requirements for the same products.

With an integrated system that uses bar codes, you could automate your lot selection process based on picking rules, such as LIFO (last in, first out), FIFO (first in, first out), or FEFO (first expire, first out). You could configure the system to your needs so that it would prompt Mike to pull the appropriate lots for each production job based on item shelf life and any customer-specific requirements you’ve entered.

Configuring refers to adapting the system to your business without altering the software’s basic programming code. Configurability is preferable to customization when it comes to expiration date management and all other business processes, because it requires less time, labor, and cost. That’s true both for initial system implementation and testing, and in managing updates throughout the software’s life cycle as operating systems and business requirements evolve.

Configuration options would let you establish alerts for lots that are nearing expiration so that the appropriate action could be taken. Also, if Mike tries to pull an expired lot from inventory, the bar code scanners should alert him so that he avoids ruining a batch.

Product Contains Milk

The last key element to improving product safety and minimizing your recall risk is label generation. Incorrect labeling—tomato sauce that fails to mention the inclusion of milk, for example—is a frequent source of recalls for otherwise high-quality products. According to data analyses by U.K.-based industry consultancy Reading Scientific Services Limited, about half of the food recalls in the U.S. and U.K. in 2008 resulted from packaging that failed to mention the presence of allergens.

Labeling mistakes are minimized in a fully integrated system. First, the software should allow you to configure labels to your specifications. By arranging data fields, logos, and other characters to your design requirements, you establish label templates without software customization. Then, because the system already stores all your recipe, lot, expiration date, batch, and quality control data, it can automatically populate the correct label template with the appropriate data. Mike simply has to click the “print labels” button.

And, because all label data is stored in one spot, making an adjustment to a calculation or an ingredient in your formula automatically drives through to your label. Your customers clearly see that a new batch of sauce contains an allergen, for example, whereas the original version of the formula did not.

The last thing you want is your company’s name plastered all over the news because your product caused consumer illnesses. It hurts your customers, it hurts your brand, and that hurts your bottom line.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a recall statistic. Implementing business software that’s designed for the food industry and integrates quality control, lot tracking, and labeling requirements with the rest of your business processes in a single system can help you respond to tainted batches with speed and effectiveness—or avoid recalls altogether.

Deakins is president of Deacom Inc., the producer of an integrated accounting and enterprise resource planning software system for food and beverage manufacturers. Reach him at [email protected] or visit www.deacom.net.