Day-to-day, there are few businesses that deal with greater liability than food and beverage processors. For those operating wholesale bakeries and other multi-ingredient operations, this liability only becomes greater due to the many ingredients, high amounts of rework, and the comingling of lots inherent in their production process. Without a robust lot tracking system, all these moving parts can and do cause mistakes in inventory records, especially if employees are manually keying or writing data. Though these errors may seem small, they can quickly become disastrous if they get in the way of performing a recall correctly.
The single most effective way to reduce these risks is by leveraging technology to automate your lot tracing, and we help over 50 operations per year do just that. In practice, this simply means that whenever goods are received, moved, reworked, packed, or shipped, they’re scanned and tracked. A record of all these events is maintained in our system, and gives complete visibility to exactly where each lot that moved through your facility ended up. Having such a detailed history helps users protect the quality of their products and meet even the most stringent recall regulations.
Digitizing your operation’s lot tracing doesn’t just reduce risk; it also reduces wasted time. As Zac Fitzgerald, CEO of Bake Works put it, “Mock recalls and lot tracing used to take us more than two hours of digging through paperwork. After implementing ParityFactory, it now takes us about 10 minutes to do a recall exercise.” Bake Works overcame many of their operational challenges with a ParityFactory implementation. You can read their full story here.
All this tracking has another benefit: because ParityFactory is tracing each lot and everything that happens to it, your team always has complete visibility to what’s in the facility, where it is, and when it got there. Our software provides you with accurate yields by production line, and dramatically reduces inventory variance.
The system also has benefits for employees at every level of the organization. Floor workers can easily find out where each ingredient they need to make a finished good is, allowing them to make better product, more quickly. Management can track inventory levels in real-time, ordering raw materials before they run too low to produce the week’s quota. The increased visibility also keeps the leadership team in sync with what’s happening on the floor, giving them an insight into the facility’s efficiency and empowering them to make well-informed strategic decisions.
Our goal is simple: helping the operations we work with ensure the quality of their food and their continued success. Interested in how ParityFactory could work with your operation? Reach out to us today and we’ll show you how!
