Digitalisation Is The Secret To Traceability - Right First Time Ingredients Drives Finished Product Quality
Traceability is key for any manufacturing process. Regardless of whether you are a food and beverage manufacturer, a pharmaceutical company or creating paints and coverings, it is vital that you track the constituent parts of your finished product and can trace these back to source ingredients.
Why Is Traceability Such A Challenge
Accurate traceability continues to be a major challenge for manufacturers, simply because most of the tracking is done manually and there are so many steps where things can go wrong.
For example, if you are performing manual powder weighing of ingredients, how do you know that each ingredient comes solely from the same batch? What happens if the operator records the wrong details or wrongly labels the dosed batch?
The challenge does not stop there; tracking the ingredients through your production line can be a little like following which cup has the coin under it, and then when your finished product flows off the production line, how confident are you that it has the right label and the right batch code?
The Answer Is Digitalising Traceability
Works orders from SAP are tracked and visualised through a bakery
Like every other sector, manufacturing is on a journey of digitalisation, connecting processes together and seamlessly flowing data between these electronically. For manufacturing, this has not been as easy compared to other sectors, as there are still many tasks that are fully manual and a reliance on operatives to pass data from one step to another naturally introduces high occurrences of errors.
Most manufacturers now have ERP and specialist manufacturing systems in place that can track the process from start to finish; the challenge is how you integrate what is physically happening with what digitally is thought to be happening.
Automating Powder Weighing
Let’s start at the very beginning of the process: powder weighing of source ingredients and batching. OAL’s APRILTM Robotics is fully automating this process; each source ingredient is kept separate, with no cross-contamination, so as the robotic arm weighs out each batch, an accurate record is kept of the constituent parts.
With the ability to integrate this into both ERP and manufacturing systems, the APRIL solution takes human intervention out of the equation. Each batch is uniquely coded and the component of each batch along with their origins are automatically captured.
This means that your manufacturing process starts with the right data that can then be automatically tracked across the entire process.
Labelling & Verification
Date code verification with AI based vision using APRIL Eye
At the other end of the process, we have the challenge of ensuring that the finished product has the right label on it, whether that be a container of soup or a pot of paint. The fact that you have accurate traceability data flowing digitally through your manufacturing system while the produce flows down your production line, you can be confident in knowing the contents of each product. The challenge now is ensuring it is labelled correctly.
Step one is tight integration into your ERP and/or manufacturing system to ensure that the correct data is being used to generate the label. For instance, if you’re printing county of origin (COO) information you need to ensure you can track COO to the batch/works order. Having a smart labelling solution is also key. At OAL, we provide solutions to not only ensure labels are produced in line with legislative and your customers’ requirements, but also verify that what should be printed is actually printed using APRIL Eye.
The final step is ensuring that the right label is placed on the right container or packaging; here again OAL label verification solutions integrate tightly with the ERP and/or manufacturing system so at the end of the production line, AI-powered software can be used to take image feeds from cameras and verify that every product leaving your production line is labelled correctly.
Smarter Traceability, Greater Productivity
Digitalising Traceability in the ways outlined above significantly reduces the risk of errors and ensures you can track each batch to the finest detail of its constituent parts.
By automating the flow of data between the manufacturing steps through your ERP/manufacturing system, you eliminate paperwork and many of the manual tasks that currently slow down your production process.
By leveraging the technology available to digitalise this critical part of manufacturing, you can reduce risk and increase the accuracy of traceability while increasing the efficiency and productivity of your end-to-end process.
Read our client success story HERE.
If you would like to discuss more about how these solutions work and how they would be beneficial to your operation, then simply reach out to the OAL team – contact us.