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Traceability:
Find
your missing links
What
would you do right now if you found that your company had
produced contaminated product?
How
would you locate and isolate the suspect batches? How quickly
could you do it?
How
would you protect consumers? How would you minimize the damage
to your company, your brand, and your personal reputation?
Traceability
is fundamental to a successful recall. Your traceability
systems have to be able to help you rapidly identify
contaminated products and their current location within the
supply chain. Real
life experiences in the UK and South America and recent
government simulations have shown that the speed in responding
to a contamination event determines the extent of negative
impact.
The
consensus is that an effective response must be launched
within 48 hours from discovery of contamination.
How
do you accomplish this?
Traceability,
crisis management and rapid response capabilities demand
immediate access to all pertinent information and data.
A
piecemeal approach to integrating the various levels of
systems, deployed throughout a plant, is not enough. Seamless
integration that provides instant cross referencing and access
to all relevant data within the system is critical in order to
meet quality and traceability objectives. The secret is
real-time data integration.
What
you need for full traceability:
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A
fully integrated data chain
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Rapid
real-time access to all data
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The
elimination of data islands
CAT2
provides the elimination of gaps in the data chain in four
main areas: (1) Raw material and ingredient batch control; (2)
Material release into the process; (3) Packing of products;
(4) Order Processing/Dispatch.
Raw
material management
In
a plant, raw materials management and batch control is the
first link in the traceability chain. Comprehensive control
over all ingredients and deliveries has a significant bearing
on your rapid response capabilities.
The
release of raw materials into the process is the second link
in the traceability chain. You need to be able to track
materials, blends, mixes etc. that are released into the
process from the materials management stage.
It
is here that many plants lose traceability. Gaps have arisen
between materials management and process manufacturing
systems. In many of todays plants, the link between the raw
materials and the process is a nonvalidated paper link.
Packing
In
most of today's plants, key process manufacturing and packing
data are held in a number of disparate IT systems as well as
in a series of manual records, such as HACCP and quality check
lists. The end result is a broken data chain unsuited to the
task of extending traceability from raw material to packing
product.
To
provide the vital link between the bulk finished products and
their physical packing it is crucial that all pertinent
information is channeled into a central system. This system
must be capable of handling data to sub-batch level, of
tracking all product movements by quantity and batch code, and
holding the data down to operator level.
Order
process/dispatch
This
stage is often financial/supply chain-driven rather than
quality and traceability-driven. To maximize traceability and
profits, you need to be able to select product that matches
customer specification.
Integrating
your processing environment with enterprise resource
planning forges the final link in the traceability chain
from dispatch back through the manufacturing process
to the materials intake stage.
Rework
If
rework is collected, and used as a raw material, or
transformed product, it
is a major source
of possible contamination that can result in huge recalls.
CAT2's solution meticulously tracks all
rework source and destinations to ensure all rework rules are
enforced.
The
CAT solution
CAT2,
primary and further processing modules, PPTS and FPTS, bridges
the gaps in the data chain by providing real time data
collection. Our tool series provides a solution for each of the
traceability areas mentioned previously.
Our
system generates a unique receipt number for the raw meat
product, and prints a label on a portable RF printer, which
includes the product details, weight and date. Other
details such as kill-date, plant origin and person receiving
the product are then stored in the database. The system
provides aging reports for the entire raw meat inventory, and
tracks which Mix-Lots consume the product. Any number of
releases from a tote is allowed and is tracked individually.
Each
case of final product is labeled with a serialized bar code
that associates that case of final product with an oven load,
and the relevant mix-lot. Racks are scanned onto
pack-out lines with a RF Palm, into a queue, which then tracks
the associated mix-lot by depleting the weight in the queue
with each cases weight. Accurate track is kept of
which cases belong to which pallet, allowing the Dispatch
system to dispatch entire applets by scanning only one label.
Parent/child
tracking of raw material to final products
is a reality. Recall from either a raw material, or finished
product direction is accurate due to unique serialization of
all incoming materials, work-in-progress, rework and finished
product.
If
you are faced with a recall don't you want the assurance CAT2
provides? Contact
us today for more information about traceability.
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May
2003 • Special
Edition •
US Food Processors
