Posts Tagged ‘internal 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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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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Internal, External, and Whole-Chain Traceability

January 26th, 2010

With the increased media publicity of food recalls, consumers are becoming more aware of the importance of food safety and the need for traceability which involves tracing where food products come from and tracking the location or destination of targeted products in the case of a recall.

There are numerous traceability drivers including consumer interest, country of origin concerns, customer demands, food safety issues, brand protection, corporate social responsibility, and government regulations.

In the buzz these days around the concept of traceability, people usually talk about whole-chain traceability which tracks goods through the entire supply chain from source to end user (eg: “farm to fork”, “cradle to grave”).

One component of whole-chain traceability is the tracking of products among trading partners. This external traceability is what the regulations set out by the U.S. (Bioterrorism Act of 2002) and the European Union (1 January 2005, Regulation 178/2002) refer to as “one up/one down” traceability.

Food businesses must be able to provide records of inputs and outputs (i.e. “one-up” and “one-down”) within a reasonable time period. This one-up and one-down rule requires companies to establish and maintain records of the source and destination of products, ingredients, and packaging materials.

Now that these regulations have been in place for some time, the next step being focused on regarding external traceability are standards for interoperability so that trading partners can share information with each other about goods being transferred between their respective organizations.

In most cases, these regulations and discussions assume that internal traceability, the second component of whole-chain traceability, is already in place within companies’ operations. They either don’t mention internal traceability, or they leave individual companies to track products internally. In some cases they make a passing mention of the required linkages from incoming to outgoing products within an organization, but there are no specific requirements related to this aspect.

Many people, including company executives, believe that they have traceability within their organizations.  They have invested considerable money in complex and costly Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and automation systems that are expected to track everything in their company, with traceability as an expected function.

Furthermore, companies have implemented case coding solutions to put bar codes and/or RFID tags onto cases and pallets of finished goods that should be (but may not actually be) scanned by an electronic device.  With these systems in place, it is common for executives to think that they have a good solution for internal traceability.

True internal traceability, however, is quite rare in the North American food industry.  The main reason is that most food companies, including large corporations, simply do not have the systems in place to be able to point to a case of their food products and identify clearly and quickly the specific source or genealogy of the raw materials, ingredients and packaging materials contained in that case by lot number, date received, and supplier. Nor could they take a source material and track it downstream through all stages of production and touch points to order fulfillment.

Whole-chain traceability depends on both external and internal traceability to avoid gaps.  External traceability is currently a hot topic, but without robust internal traceability capabilities, the authenticity of whole-chain traceability is seriously compromised.

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