Meeting The Challenges Of Product Traceability With Automated Data Collection

Whether you are a manufacturer, a fabricator, a food processor, or even a raw materials provider, there is a good possibility that you either already have or will soon be required to provide product traceability information to your customers. Product liability and risk management are now a corporate reality spreading rapidly across industries.

What is Product Traceability?

• Product traceability is not only the ability of a manufacturer to trace a product through its distribution network to the end customer, but also to have the ability to retrace a product backwards through its manufacturing processing history, and back even further to the component level to its suppliers.
• Product traceability systems are commonly implemented by the Quality Control Department; thereby gaining visibility into the product's manufacturing history.
• A traceability system can be critical when a product is recalled, has failed after use, or when other manufacturing problems are detected either before or after the product enters the supply chain
• The ability to view manufacturing process history data allows manufacturers to identify potentially compromised products by lot, batch, assembly, kit, revision, component, etc. Recalls and customer notifications can then be limited to only the affected products.

Traceability Challenges:

Building an effectual traceability system involves:

• Determining what product and manufacturing process attributes to collect and maintain in history
• Determining when during the manufacturing process to begin collecting what attributes
• Begin with raw material attributes from supplier?
• At inspection? At assembly? At shipping?
• Understanding the magnitude of data that needs to be collected and how that will be done – This Is Critical!

While some ERP systems accommodate limited forms of traceability, the variable data attributes that need to be collected (based on customer requirement, product type and industry) make it difficult for an ERP system to meet a specific traceability requirement out of the box. Some examples of the very long list of data attributes that may need to be tracked include; job, material, heat/lot (or other raw material characteristics, serial, pallet, container, part (item), each part produced by shift, line, machine, tooling, worker, expiration date, use by date, truck temperature, or QA results. Collecting traceability data needs to be an integral part of the same automated data collection system that is used to collect transactional data for the ERP system such as receiving, inventory movements and counts, work order processing, labeling, shipping, etc.