What does Product tracing really mean?, Who does it affect?, What changes will it involve in your daily work? How can you implement it in your company without burdening your product cost?
What does Product tracing really mean?
Most traceability definitions you can find through the Internet are quite ambiguous in my opinion, and you don't understand them very well. So I will try to define product tracing in a direct and simple way.
"Product tracing consists of been able to say about any product what items make it up and in what proportions, who was the provider you bought each row material used to make the product and finally the client details for each product lot you delivered to them that has passed through your facilities."
Due to this same structure, Product tracing is divided into 3 blocks:
The so-called "Backward Traceability" that corresponds with knowing the source for every product or component. The so-called "Process Traceability", that corresponds with knowing the detailed composition of every prepared product, and "Forward Traceability" that focuses in knowing who are the clients you delivered each product lot from your company.
Who is affected by the product tracing normative in the US?
The main US regulation in terms of product tracing is the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), that talks about traceability and beyond, regulating different aspects of food safety. As a general rule, every person or company that is dedicated to human or pet feeding, as well as the whole industries of food packaging, food additives, coatings, gases or any other component in direct contact with food in its packaging are subject to FSMA.
What changes will product tracing involve in your daily work?
In the next paragraphs I will explain you the implications and changes that this legal regulation will provoke on the productive processes in a generic plant. If you want me to send you a specific document about how and where you would need to make this adjustments in your production sector, fill in the form on the right indicating the sector your company belongs and we will be pleased to deliver it to you.
Depending somewhat on your plant process structure, the procedures you will need to check can be many and diverse. To simplify all, I recommend you to focus in recording a basic registry with the most important product moves that happen in your plant and making this records as simple as possible and similar to the rest for every section. The three great movement blocks you will have to focus in are: the reception of row material coming for providers, the transfer of materials into the workplace / processing plant or coming from them as processed products and the product expedition you make from your facilities to your clients.
How are the inspection procedures?
Traceability inspections or audits in the company request you to provide a long list of requirements designed to verify that you have certain control level over traceability issues. Some of this requirements are: check that you have labeled and differentiated every lot of the same product kind in your stores or wharehouses, check that you can provide lots and references of each row material used in the processed products you produce in your plant, historical forward and backward traceability data lists for some product batches you served to your clients, etc.
If you analyze these requirements, you will see that everyone is made thinking in simplifying inspectors / auditors work in plant. And right there is the secret, because you must focus it just the opposite. Your focus must be... "how you can do this the easiest way for my plant operation and for my production processes."
How can you implement product tracing in your company without burdening your product cost?
If you approach this key concept in your traceability system implementation wrong, and you try to keep the documentation required by inspectors ready without addressing the root issue, traceability will be for you an ordeal of internal bureaucracy and costs that will end overloading the price at which you can offer your product in the market.
If you approach the issue the adequate way instead, with simple records on the basic operations in your production process, you will see how the traceability system can bring important benefits for your plant in the form of enormous profitability increases.
The most direct benefit is the significant waste reduction in row materials and intermediate products that you'll get through the lot and expiration control traceability provides. And this is only one of the profitability bags that can be reached when this kind of project is approached the right way.
Keys to achieve it in your industry
There are huge operational differences among the diverse sorts of companies making up the food and beverage sector. The key points to join traceability and performance in a fish processing plant are not the same as those applied to a bakehouse or a meat processing plant.
If this is a topic you are interested in, fill in the form on the right marking the checkbox "Send traceability & profitability paper" and enclosed to the rest of detailed documentation we will also send you the specific paper about the keys to achieve that extra productivity just in your same company model in your production sector.
Why do we give in all this information for free?
In the National Product tracing Portal FSMA.us.com we have been working in this field for a long time. Since the very first moment we have made and collected hundreds of specific documents about the "traceability & profitability" issue for each of the different production sectors in the food and beverage industry.
Giving you all this documentation is not an extra work for us if you need it. That is simply a collection of some of the documents we have been making all this time. So if in addition to comply with our training and outreach work in the sector, we can be useful for you in some way, it will be a pleasure for us doing it.
Kind regards,
FSMA.us.com