Track and Trace systems are simple in concept. They track every step of your manufacturing processes, including the consumables used and what was produced. At a basic level, this helps identify affected products if a raw material was contaminated—or find the lot numbers which were affected by an inadvertently changed setpoint on a particular machine.

Additionally, regulated industries are required to use Track and Traceability systems. This is the case for pharmaceutical and food and beverage manufacturers with the Drug Quality and Security Act, and the Food Safety Modernization act respectively. If you’re ahead of the curve, your vendors and customers might already be tied into your system for a complete “farm to table” view.

Even if you aren’t regulated to use one, a Track and Trace system is a very powerful tool for any manufacturing company.

The Basics of Track and Trace

Track and Trace requires a handful of data points. First, what are the different steps of your process?

Individual steps can include:

• Moving materials from one location to another

• Processing material on production equipment

• Sending materials to the lab

• Performing QA/QC testing

• Shipping the material to the warehouse or a customer

• Any other operation that consumes, touches, or moves material and goods through your process

For each step, we need to know:

• What material/parts/in-process goods are inputs to the step?

  • Where did they come from? (warehouse location, at-line inventory, etc.)

• What comes out of the step?

  1. Where did those parts/goods/quantity produced go? (warehouse location, at-line inventory, etc.)

• What lot numbers are part of this step, and are new lot numbers generated in the step?

• Other data you would like to record besides when a step occurred and on what machines?

Once you build a map of your process along with each step, storage location, and data you want to collect, you can integrate it all into a Track and Trace System. Given that we really enjoy using Ignition, we typically use the Sepasoft Track and Trace Module. This module provides a graphical interface to configure all of these operations. It also automatically generates a trace graph with drill-down functionality as your production lines run.

What You See

As a production line operates, a “Trace Graph” of each operation will build for any given set of lots. This graph will show you what goes into each step—raw materials, what operation the step entails, and where the finished item from that step goes. If you have multiple in-process steps, you will see the materials consumed in future steps based on their lot numbers. You can click into any step to get more information about the materials consumed/produced, as well as the step itself.

With this chart, it’s easy to select a finished lot number and see every single step the product went through before it rolled off the line. You’ll know where the raw material came from, what lot numbers were used, where everything went, and what happened along the way.

What You Get with Track and Trace

While a trace graph is a powerful visual aid for observing what happened during any production run, what is the real power of Track and Trace?

We believe the real power of Track and Trace is that it simplifies the process of determining the impact of any issues with your finished products. For example, if you send a finished food product for QA testing and find a bacterial infection, you can pull up that lot number, see all of the lab results for all of the raw materials that went into that lot, check the maintenance status and tests of all of your equipment, and determine where the bacteria came from. Then you can cross reference the affected raw material lot numbers and equipment to determine which other finished lot numbers you need to quarantine while waiting for lab results before they’re shipped it to customers.

If a customer has already found a contaminated product, you can use track and trace to speed up the recall process with a completely digital process for finding any affected lots. Imagine the huge amount of time involved in cross referencing all of this information if everything was only stored on paper and you had to go dig through dozens and dozens of files!

What You Want: Peace of Mind

Obviously, we want to help our customers produce perfect products every time. You never want to have to dig back into your records to recall product, and you certainly don’t want to get the negative press of a recall when those products have made it into customer’s hands.

While Track and Trace alone won’t ensure you never have to do a recall. But in the event of a recall, Track and Trace will save an immense amount of time and energy to ensure 100% coverage of any affected lot numbers. It will also help you to exclude lot numbers that were not affected and potentially reduce the overall negative impact of the recall. Track and Trace gives you the ability to be more transparent, react to issues more quickly and thoroughly, and reduce the headaches involved during an otherwise very stressful event.

While Track and Trace certainly isn’t the “sexiest” piece of technology in the manufacturing world, still we think it is one of the most beneficial to have and not need, rather than need and not have.