Is your facility producing the safest, greatest products? How fast would it take you to use some of the tracking’s and analyzing around food traceability to the FDA if there was an unplanned eruption at your site? Are you presently utilizing technology to reduce this performance and increase profit rather than allowing time for a flame to begin before putting it out? These are the important questions you should be asking yourself each day as a food and beverage producer. In a global marketplace, a single food safety blunder can mean the difference between a consumer taking up your product or handing it by.
Only the most inexperienced food processors and producers recognize the significance of food traceability and the stages required to comply. However, they may be unaware of the position that software such as an ERP can play in their efforts to improve transparency, food safety, and recall preparedness.
Rather than depending on a manual system, disjointed departmental info, and databases to keep your company compatible, why not allow a method designed specifically for the food industry to do the heavy lifting for you?
You can optimize your accountability efforts to ensure you’re always complying with food production safety programs and regulations by exploiting the traceability, efficiency, and precautionary usability built into an ERP software. The integration and attributes that food manufacturers require from their software to assist in their food hygiene attempts and mainly categorized compliance are outlined below.
What is the Significance of Traceability?
Each year, 600 million people are expected to become ill as a result of polluted food. Physical contaminants (such as hair, glass, or insects), industrial chemicals (such as antibiotics, insecticides, or household cleaners), and biological agents are all examples of contamination (like bacteria or parasites). Human pathogens caused by contaminated food are becoming more difficult to identify and inhibit as the world’s food supply chains become more globalized.
To tackle contamination, enforcing bodies and security auditors have established tighter guidelines and standards to make the food we eat is secure. Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI), and BRC Global Standards are a few of these security teams. While these agencies play a critical role in ensuring the appropriate safety of our food supply, it can be challenging for food manufacturers to maintain pace with constantly changing safety guidelines and regulations without a system in place to assist them. And if you can’t achieve these requirements, you’ll have a hard time growing your business and attempting to land contracts.
What Role Does Software Play?
It is critical to recognize that not all item tracing systems should be designed equitably. Although many food manufacturers have some sort of tracing system in place, many of these systems fall short of providing adequate traceability and preventing product recalls.
You’ll need the opportunity to blend a prevention-and-proof strategy to traceability (which the FDA now mandates as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act) with the more conventional record-and-response strategy to lot tracking and recall to implement a comprehensive attitude towards food safety throughout your warehouse.
- Quality procedures that can be enforced at different phases of materials handling are built-in.
- A routine maintenance module that requires effective processing equipment maintenance and upgrades.
- Allergen detection.
- Ability to track each lot number of stated ingredients while recording lot number changes as the product is manufactured.
Your product tracing solution might include the system to detect a product at numerous degrees of specificity, not just at the item level, about a prevention-and-proof strategy to traceability. It’s critical to have a system that can monitor the lot, serial, and batch control to help your company can monitor an item bi-directionally through the production process.
This accessibility into the numerous stages of product traceability is important to ensure that you can rapidly and effortlessly see the serial number’s historical record at any time. Every transaction is monitored within the system and quickly confirmed with an ERP solution constructed for the food industry, from the moment a serial is purchased or generated to the time it reaches your facility. With the advanced automation date stamps, you can also see who made the transaction, which is useful in the event of an inspection, and when the transaction occurred.
Keep in mind those food safety specifications and expectations we mentioned earlier, and how important it is to follow them? Having, transparency control, and knowledge into your traceability attempts throughout your entire manufacturing process helps to make sure complying and probably pass mock traceability audits that big investors such as Walmart and Costco require to stay in business with them.
How Quickly Do You Recall Items?
It is pointless to address food traceability without mentioning recalls. While the federal govt. requires a product recall to be implemented within 24 hours, most big-box clients demand even better and quick results. You potentially lose business if you can’t pass a mock recall that is often mandated by bigger competitors.
You can offer a complete product recall in under 60 seconds with a software platform like an ERP with food-specific usability. Various software ERP, for instance, has developed capabilities that allow manufacturers to conduct bi-directional product recalls by tracing data all the right up to the material or item level. Furthermore, automated templates built right into solutions like ERP software, as well as integrations with Microsoft or Outlook, make focus on the quality your clients about recall simple and quick.
