Posts Tagged ‘food traceability’

Internal Traceability is Hard to Achieve

March 3rd, 2010

One-up and one-down.  You need to know where your products come from and where they go.  That’s the law in the U.S. with the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 and in the E.U. with the Common Food Law put into effect in 2005.

Let’s suppose you comply with that.  Hopefully you do.  This means that if an inspector requested that you show the source of an ingredient or raw material that went into a product, you could do that.  But at what level of certainty?  Would you have to widen a potential recall because you couldn’t limit the source to a particular batch or time period?

That’s why recalls are often so widespread and sometimes are expanded beyond the initial scope.

What you need is a method to positively link the “one-down” with the “one-up” and vice-versa.   Many people expect that they have this capability.

One Up and One Down is not enough

If you’re called on by an inspector to produce records of shipments or received items do you really want to spend a lot of time leafing through papers and file drawers trying to sort this type of thing out?

It seems obvious to many of us in the business of integrated systems and data collection and reporting solutions that a good integrated software and equipment solution brings many benefits.  With such a system, companies can streamline the process of performing traceability, and they can also reduce their risk and gain a lot of significant productivity and cost advantages.

Yet complete systems that provide true internal traceability are rare in the North American food industry.

There are numerous reasons for the lack of a good internal traceability system.  Probably many of them are due to the lack of one or more of the following required elements:

  • Leadership needs to understand the value and make it a priority
  • Corporate culture has to be developed to make it work
  • Processes need to be defined clearly and the system needs to be aligned with them
  • The solution must be adopted by all the parties who will interface with it
  • Proper resources must be allocated
  • The right technology (software and equipment) has to be applied
  • Finances must be available

We’ll review these areas in more detail in later blogs.  As we do, it will become clear that in order to implement a true and complete internal traceability solution, it will take a lot of commitment and hard work.  But we’ll also show how it will be worth the effort and the investment.

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Cost Justifying a Traceability Solution

February 21st, 2010

Who’s going to pay for traceability?

That’s a common question in the food industry these days.  A senior director in a well-known food company told me recently, “No one will pay for traceability.”

Of course, a traceability system is going to have costs associated with it.  Initially there’s the cost of implementing a solution with equipment, software, services, and internal resources.   Ongoing costs add up for materials, system maintenance, and labour associated with additional process steps.

It’s not likely that the average consumer will be willing to pay extra for product that is traceable back to the source.  I don’t expect my wife at the grocery store to look at two similar packages of meat, for example, and say to herself, “Oh, this one’s traceable.  I’ll pay the extra price for it.”

Retailers likely won’t pay for it.  You know how it goes.  They’ll expect both traceability and lower prices.

So it appears that the costs of traceability, like so many other initiatives, will fall on the backs of the processors and manufacturers.

But it doesn’t have to be the case.  If things are done well, there is actually a pretty good deal available for the food processing companies.  (Just don’t let the other parties know.)

For the most part, the food industry could use a good shot in the arm to update their level of technology in order to achieve higher levels of productivity and lower production costs.  It’s time, and the increasing need for traceability may actually be a great tool to realize huge benefits.

While many expect companies to already have suitable internal traceability, what is all too common are manual systems based on paper files – even in 2010.  Plus in most companies’ operations there are gaps in the data chain, lack of real-time data visibility, and islands of technology.  Internal traceability?  Hardly.

The time for internal traceability in organizations is ripe.  And the potential benefits really are significant.

Internal traceability should not be embarked upon as a solution in itself.  It should, in fact, be seen as a by-product of a complete plant productivity solution that incorporates visibility and control tools.  With all product movements and transformations being monitored in real time, internal traceability will be one of the outputs of the right kind of system.

Here are some great benefits of implementing a complete internal traceability solution:

Area of Benefit Some “Top of List” Benefits
Brand protection Risk management with complete lot traceability
Labour reduction Automation, less time searching, counting
Productivity Visibility leads to better decisions and more efficient processes
Cost control Better management of raw materials, improved yields, production goal monitoring
Label control Central label design, approval process, database-driven product, nutritional, and ingredient details
Quality improvements Attribute checking, better stock rotation, lot control, quality checklists, SPC on piece weights, QA holds, process control
Better customer service More visibility of orders in real time, improved image, more accurate order fulfillment
Regulatory Compliance Food safety & quality, HACCP, record keeping, weights, labeling, nutritional & ingredient declaration, traceability (e.g. one-up, one-down)
Insurance Rapid detailed recall capabilities, support for limited recall scope, due diligence to help reduce litigation risk

Take a look at your organization in light of these potential benefits and see where you can find significant improvements.  It’s likely that you could easily cost justify the right solution that will offer many of these benefits.

Don’t focus on the costs of internal traceability.  Consider a full, detailed plant productivity solution that gives complete real-time visibility of products and events, and internal traceability will be one of the built-in deliverables.  Implement a technology solution for in-plant benefits that will pay for itself.

Stay tuned.  We’ll review the many components of an Internal Traceability solution and how they produce benefits.

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The Next Big Food Safety Story . . . Yours?

February 18th, 2010

I never like to see companies being slammed in the news.

I like Kellogg. I like their cereals.

I believe that Kellogg isn’t as bad as this article makes them out to be.

But the reality is that they are getting bad press. Why?

When I hear of a problem, I often think of a kaizen process of asking a series of 5 “Why?”s to get to a deeper level of understanding of the source of a problem.  It could go something like this:

  1. Kellogg is getting bad press. Why?
  2. Atlanta plant inspection found bacterial contamination and sanitation violations. Why?
  3. The plant had “significant deviations” from the manufacturing practices for food manufacturers. Why?
  4. Proper food safety steps were not enforced.  Why?
  5. There’s not a good system in place.  Why???

I don’t know the why of number 5 with Kellogg or even if this is accurate, but here are some possibilities of “Why” that I’ve seen a lot with companies:

  • Our ERP system is supposed to do it (but it doesn’t, because either it can’t, or that module is not yet implemented – and it will take a long time, a lot of money, and IT resources that are forever tied up with other priorities)
  • At the management level, we expected that we  have a system
  • Our people are expected to be accountable with or without a system
  • We haven’t found a good system that works
  • We have a system, but it isn’t being used properly

Whatever the reason, there is certainly a growing awareness and an increasing need for companies to have a working system and to use it.

The system could be a manual process, but a manual system will require very tight observation, discipline, and accountability.

A good electronic solution can make the job of ensuring processes are adequately followed so much easier.  Of course, it could be that such a system is not used properly, but with the right system, quality assurance managers can be alerted when conditions are not met, or parameters are outside critical limits.  If certain HACCP or GMP checklists are not followed according to a prescribed schedule, the right people can be notified by email, text message, or other method.

The technology is here.  The systems are available.  The payback is justifiable.

Without the system, the risk is high – too high.  The media is always out there, hunting for sensational stories.  Don’t let your company be the next big food safety issue news item.

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Traceability and the Hype Cycle

February 16th, 2010

Oh, the fun of hyped-up technologies. Do you remember just a few years ago how big RFID was? Or, more accurately, how big it was going to be? It didn’t roll out as expected. This is a good example of the hype cycle, often called the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Here’s a look at how the cycle works:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

A new technology hits the marketplace. The media picks up on it, and suddenly it’s all the rage. Investors jump on the bandwagon, and the crowd gets all excited about it.

But somewhere along the way, reality sets in, and it begins to dawn on people that it will take more work (oh, no – work!) than originally expected to implement what’s needed to make the technology actually work or become widely adopted.

What’s happening with RFID?

I work in the technology field for in-plant productivity, data acquisition and visibility solutions. We have been implementing bar code solutions for over 20 years, and we have done RFID projects since the early 1990s. Prior to that, while I was in university in the late 80s, I worked on a large dairy farm that implemented wearable RFID transponders for cows to monitor and control their lactation cycles and their milking and eating status.

When RFID started to become big news, (I know it’s easy to say now) but it was clear to me with a university physics background that the idea of tagging and reading RFID on cases was going to be difficult and nearly impossible, especially with items like meat that absorb the RF signals, and metal cans that reflect signals.

This diagram from Gartner (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1124212) illustrates where some technologies are on the hype cycle:

Do you see RFID in the “Trough of Disillusionment”?

As it turns out, there are definitely valid, workable applications for RFID, but they’re different from what many folks thought 5 years ago.

Carlisle Technology, for example, offers RFID solutions for food plants to track carts, tubs, and combos. The solutions can be short-read-range with passive tags, or long-range to do location tracking within a warehouse or cooler. So the technology is still valid, but for the right applications. As time goes on, we’ll see more uses and adoption for RFID along the more gradual upward curve.

Traceability and the growing hype

I have my Google News alerts set to look for Food Safety and Traceability, so I watch what’s going regarding this topic. I think we’re on the early steep rising side of the Hype Cycle when it comes to Traceability. And I’ll tell you why I think this.

Take Fresh Produce, for instance. Some of the produce associations have done a good job of setting up an initiative that will help their industry achieve traceability. See www.producetraceability.org. They’ve clearly outlined the steps that produce pickers/packers need to follow. And it’s a good move. The huge recalls in produce need to be reduced, contained, and eliminated.

Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) Compliance

There are numerous companies out there (including Carlisle) that are now boasting that they/we have PTI compliant solutions. It’s not always clear what they everybody is offering, but initially, a PTI compliant solution means the tools that will enable produce companies to put bar code labels on each and every case of produce, displaying and encoding the GTIN and Lot number.

This is the easy part. Almost anyone can do that.

Another PTI step in a couple of years will be the ability to read and store the case and pallet bar code labels.

Again, this not a big deal. Several companies have solutions for this. Carlisle Technology’s meat and poultry customers have been doing this for a couple of decades already with case-level serialization and detailed pallet handling.

But what’s not easy, and this is where it separate the men from the boys, so to speak, is providing an integrated solution that enables each organization to positively track and have complete real-time visibility of all items within their enterprise.

The reality is that produce packing houses are more complex than simply receiving products in one door and shipping them out another. Quality checks, inventory management, proper stock rotation and sortation are required. There are mixed lots and grading of products within lots according to parameters such as quality, size, and color. Product can be received from outside suppliers with or without the proper information. Product from their own fields or greenhouses need to be received by recording several attributes. Market pricing affects what gets shipped to whom and when. Grower payment is dependent on the price paid downstream, so there needs to be accurate tracking throughout of where grower-specific product was sold.

This requires not only the right kind of system including equipment and software, but the following of the necessary procedures.

What we’ll see in the next few years, I expect, is that companies will realize that applying labels and scanning bar codes won’t be enough. They will have to work with a solution provider to do the hard work of tracking products accurately at each step in their processes.

Traceability is Not the Goal

I fully expect that traceability itself won’t be the goal; rather, in-plant productivity solutions that incorporate registering every product movement and transformation, along with capturing quality details and doing the appropriate checks at each control point, and then having real-time visibility into the product movements and related activities will be the goal. And in reaching that goal, traceability will come along for the ride and be a by-product of achieving those objectives.

We’ll see the traceability topic continue to rise meteorically, and then reality will set in and something else will be big news. And those of us who have solutions and are committed for the long term will continue past the trough of disillusionment to work on implementing the needed solutions that will provide the benefits (link to benefits) that are surely out there.

Watch or ride the cycle. Then let’s talk about real solutions that really work.

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Traceability Requires Several Key Elements

February 9th, 2010

A couple of years ago, I met with a Food Safety representative of one of our government agencies.  We got talking about traceability, and she asked me what my experience showed regarding the percentage of food companies that have traceability solutions.  I said to her that from what I can see, traceability in the food industry in North America does not exist.  This was interesting to her because, as it turned out, the day prior to this she had sat through a thesis presentation of a master’s student who claimed that 85% of companies she had studied had traceability solutions.  The person I was meeting with commented that she herself leaned towards my findings.

Obviously we have a different view on what traceability means.

My boss was at the Traceability Interoperability Summit last month in Denver, and he reported that one of the presenters had surveyed over 100 companies to see how they were meeting the one-up and one-down traceability requirements as mandated by the Bioterrorism Act of 2002.  My boss asked me what my guess was as to the percentage of companies that were compliant.  I guessed zero, which was exactly what this other company had found.

Without even realizing it, many food processing operations do not have true and complete internal traceability because they fail in one or more of the following required areas:

  1. real-time data entry and access
  2. no data islands
  3. integrated data chain
  4. no gaps

(I don’t remember the source of this list.)

They may have some form of product tracking, but it often doesn’t classify as a traceability solution.  I mean, could they scan the bar code of a finished goods case and be able to pull up within a couple of minutes all the lot numbers and suppliers of each and every ingredient and component in that case, including packaging?  And do they have a system that would enable them to determine all the downstream locations, lot numbers, finished goods, and orders of a specific  ingredient that is found to be suspect?

1) Real-time data entry and real-time access to information:  Clipboards with paper and pen are still amazingly commonplace.  Manual recording is used for downtime recording, quality/HACCP forms, and other data collection.  Some of this data is never entered into an electronic system but is filed for potential manual retrieval.  Other data is keyed in manually at a later time for the purpose of generating reports and graphs to be posted after the fact.  It’s not uncommon to see posted reports that are months old.

2) No data islands:  Widespread use of tools such as MS Excel spreadsheets, which may do some basic importing of data but operate mostly as off-line tools, shows that data islands exist.  Departmental “silos” keep people from having visibility of other areas of the plant.

3) Integrated data chain: Too often there are multiple vendor systems that are not exchanging data that would enhance their capability.  With the robust and reliable interface methodologies available, gone are the days when interfaces between systems need to be an issue.  Using best of breed systems is the best strategy for overall performance and value as long as the systems are communicating with each other.  For example, an ERP system will not offer complete in-plant product tracking with interfaces to devices (although some actually claim to, the truth is that there is no one system that will do everything for everybody, even within a single company).  But the ERP system’s capabilities will be extended with an appropriate interface with the right in-plant productivity solution.

4) No gaps: (receiving – raw material and ingredient batch control – material issue into processes – work-in-process including rework – transformation – pack-off – inventory – order fulfillment):  Data gaps in the processes prevent complete traceability since there is not a satisfying link from source to destination.

A true internal traceability solution is characterized by these elements.   What’s needed in many food processing plants is an integrated solution that meets these traceability requirements.  Without it, paper abounds, schedules are missed, product gets lost, labour goes wasted, and food safety is at risk.

I’d be interested in knowing what are your thoughts regarding the adoption in the food industry of traceability according to the above requirements.

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Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) Requirements Met by Carlisle

February 5th, 2010

The produce industry associations have introduced the Produce Traceability Initiative (www.producetraceability.org), an industry-wide effort to bring electronic traceability to the produce supply chain by 2012.

Carlisle Technology is well-equipped to help produce companies meet and exceed the PTI requirements. With years of experience providing integrated bar coding solutions for the food industry, Carlisle Technology is well ahead of the curve with regards to traceability solutions for produce.

Having provided bar code labeling, scanning, and traceability solutions for the meat and poultry industry in North America since 1988, Carlisle’s first work involving GS1-128 bar code labels was in 1993 when Loblaw Company, Canada’s largest grocery retailer, required meat and poultry companies to code cases of catch weight (variable weight) products with the new UCC/EAN-128 bar code (now called GS1-128).

Here are some key features of Carlisle Technology’s solution as it relates to the Produce Traceability Initiative:

Case Labeling:

  • Generates GS1-128 compliant case labels using database driven information.
  • Label formats are product code specific (i.e. selecting a product determines the label format)
  • Labeling can be manual or automated (print & apply)
  • Supports lot tracking and control
  • Supports Country of Origin details
  • Supports export labeling with foreign description
  • Exceeds all required data elements for the PTI

Pallet Labeling:

  • Complete Pallet Handling capabilities (with mixed product, lots, etc.)
  • Support for the SSCC Pallet identifier
  • Support for multiple lots and related bar codes
  • SSCC references all the details of the cases (standard functionality, but not required by the PTI)
  • Labeling can be manual or automated (print & apply). Applicators can label 2 sides.
  • Supports ASNs (Advanced Shipping Notices)

Traceability:

  • Supports one-up and one-down traceability requirements
  • Provides complete internal traceability (tracking all physical entities within an organization)
  • Detailed lot tracking
  • Case-level serialization is included (standard functionality, but not required by the PTI)
  • Exceeds all required data elements for the PTI
  • Offers complete, detailed inventory control
  • Includes order picking and shipping with mobile bar code scanning terminals
  • Produces all shipping documentation
  • Interfaces with accounting systems for electronic data transfers and posting

With Carlisle Technology as your supplier of integrated traceability solutions, you can count on our experience in and commitment to the food industry to help you implement the right system in a way that provides a return on your investment by improving your own operations while you meet the PTI requirements.

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