Traceability In Food & Beverage Manufacturing is The Cornerstone of Quality

Compliance and quality are the foundations all great food & beverage manufacturers rely on to create and strengthen trust with their distribution networks and customers. How strong they are at traceability is the cornerstone every one of them rely on to meet compliance requirements and keep excelling at quality.

Traceability Is Key To Excelling At Compliance And Quality for Food & Beverage Manufacturing Companies

Traceability for food & beverage manufacturers isn’t optional anymore. Consider how critical it is to stay in compliance with FDA 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance (Doc Control, Quality Level 1), Receipt Management compliance reporting requirements, Batch & Ingredient Tracking, Quality Assurance including SPC/Quick Inspection, Recall Tracking, Employee Training Tracking, Seasonal Demand Forecasting in addition to many other initiatives underway.

There’s even greater intensity to improve quality levels internally, which makes traceability indispensable to every production center a food & beverage manufacturer is using today and planning for the future. From the shop floor to the top floor, this commitment to quality permeates every process workflow, supply chain interaction, production plan, and finished product quality. Choosing to excel and track and traceability is the cornerstone of many market-leading manufacturer’s success:

  • Track and traceability provides food & beverage manufacturing companies with the data, insights, and information they need to stay in compliance with many of the most demanding compliance requirements in manufacturing today. FDA 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance (Doc Control, Quality Level 1), Receipt Management compliance reporting requirements, Batch & Ingredient Tracking, and the wide variety of customer-driven compliance and reporting requirements need the data track-and-trace systems provide. Market leaders use these compliance requirements as fuel to drive even greater levels of production and process efficiency throughout their multiple plant locations.
  • Excelling at FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance while reducing manufacturing costs with track-and-traceability is the path to profitable growth for all food & beverage manufacturers today. Reducing manufacturing costs, staying in compliance with 21 CFR Part 11, and gaining greater accuracy and speed in supply chains is all dependent on having a proven track and traceability framework in place.
  • Track and traceability are invaluable for troubleshooting supplier quality problems and averting larger challenges in the future. The more production locations a food and beverage manufacturer has, the more important supply chain visibility is to maintaining quality levels and meeting production forecasts. Track and traceability save many manufacturers from the high, unpredictable expenses of a product recall by catching product quality problems early.
  • Improving food & beverage manufacturing efficiency by making quality and traceability data available at all production locations. Improving the accuracy and speed of track and traceability data across all production locations fuels greater collaboration and knowledge sharing. For food & beverage manufacturers who are engaging in collaborative planning forecasting and replenishment (CPFR), track-and-trace data and the visibility it provides improve supplier quality while increasing production efficiency.
  • Reducing the expense, impact, and risk of product recalls by having accurate genealogies and recipe management history of each product available in real-time. Minimizing the impact of food recalls by tracking to the lot, batch or bin level where a defective ingredient originated from can save millions of dollars in product recall costs.  Using genealogies to discover how a defective or low-quality ingredient was first introduced into production is invaluable.

Conclusion

Improving supply chain visibility, contributing to optimized inventory and expiry management, providing higher quality data that drives better forecasting, reducing inventory shrinkage throughout the supply chain are a few of the many benefits of automating track-and-trace. Track-and-trace systems adopted by food and beverage manufacturers are designed to provide greater visibility across supplier networks while providing metrics and KPIs on dashboards accessible on any Internet-capable device anywhere, anytime.

Download the Track and Trace Whitepaper

Louis Columbus

Louis is currently serving as DELMIAWorks Brand Senior Marketing Manager. Previous positions include Director Product Management at Ingram Cloud, Vice President Marketing at iBASEt, Plex Systems, Senior Analyst at AMR Research (now Gartner), marketing and business development at SaaS start-ups.