Earlier this month I had the pleasure of presenting the latest capabilities in Nulogy Shop Floor through our Lunch and Learn Webinar: End to End Traceability for Co-Pack Operations.
If you’re a co-packer who has food and beverage brands and food manufacturers as customers, you’ll know why traceability and risk are growing concerns. The direct impact of traceability failures can be costly: for example, according to the Food Marketing Institute, the average cost of a single recall in the food industry is in the range of $10 million. Further, 23% of all recalls exceed $30 million.
In addition to direct financial impacts, food and beverage brands and their supply chains must also be wary of indirect costs such as damage to brand reputation, lost sales, and legal fees.
Co-packers who use Nulogy Shop Floor already understand the benefits of using purpose-built software to manage their production, instead of alternative methods such as over-extended ERPs, homebuilt solutions, or even (heaven forbid) spreadsheets.
But, how can Nulogy Shop Floor help contract packagers with traceability and inventory management for food and beverage customers? While I can’t spoil (no pun intended) all the insights from our latest webinar, I believe that Nulogy Shop Floor excels at contributing to two major objectives for co-packers and their customers:
- Providing greater inventory and production data granularity for brand customers
- Reducing manual work and saving personnel time on co-pack production floors
To summarize the knowledge shared in the webinar, in this article I’ll share three ways how Shop Floor can give you a traceability advantage while managing your co-pack operation.
Let’s dive in.
Enhanced FEFO Picking & Consumption
First Expiring First out (FEFO) picking from warehouse inventory minimizes the risk of using expired components or ingredients, while also optimizing inventory usage by selecting materials with the earliest expiration date. The latest updates we’ve made to Shop Floor help enforce this procedure for the picking process as well as the production process. With Shop Floor, FEFO control extends past picking and is enforced as pallets are moved into Work In Progress (WIP) status.
By enforcing FEFO for your WIP processes, your operation is reducing risk and liability by ensuring that the inventory closest to expiry is used first. Further, operators can raise exceptions to this rule when picking inventory, which will help give you better insight into how and why materials are being picked and consumed for specific jobs.
Intelligent Lot Code Generation
Intelligent Code Generation (ICG) is a Nulogy Shop Floor feature which helps co-packers automatically generate finished good lot codes based on configurable logic rules. On many plant floors, lot codes (and expiry dates) are calculated manually by operators, which not only adds extra time but can also introduce the risk of miscalculations.
Automating lot generation helps improve accuracy and, just as importantly, assists with meeting the wide range of brand customer requirements for lot codes, which includes batch numbers, expiry dates, and shift/line information.
ICG automatically calculates lot codes based on the production data fragments defined by the customer. These data fragments often vary from customer to customer but can include codes for shifts, facilities, and machines, for example.
With ICG, co-packers can further save time and effort, while reducing risk of mixups or errors which can potentially cascade into more severe issues down the road.
Inherit Lot/Expiry (And Chocolate!)
This new capability in Shop Floor allows finished goods to automatically inherit the lot code and expiry date from the earliest expiring subcomponent for a finished good. In doing so, we are able to standardize subcomponents originating from multiple sources and differing lot code formats to save time and work for staff on production floors.
In the below clip, I explain how this function is especially relevant for co-pack operations that are handling chocolate or other confectionary products.
Bonus: Recall Reports (and Consumption by Lot Reports)
In the event of recalls or track and trace activities, Shop Floor’s Recall Report helps provide quick, granular visibility both backwards and forwards in time: How and where were materials consumed? Where were finished goods sent? In addition, Shop Floor’s Consumption by Lot Report is of special use to track which subcomponent pallet numbers went into the creation of a finished good pallet.
As supply disruptions and regulatory changes continue to upend production orders for food and beverage manufacturers, it is increasingly critical to be able to provide deep traceability data for your customers.
Watch the full webinar!
I hope that was a useful summary of the latest capabilities that were covered in our Lunch and Learn Webinar: End to End Traceability for Co-Pack Operations. Please give the video a watch and don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like to learn more about Nulogy Shop Floor for your food and beverage operation.
Try Nulogy Shop Floor for yourself today
As the only purpose-built software for co-packers, Nulogy continues to evolve with new features and capabilities to help contract packagers save time and effort while improving data visibility for themselves and their customers.
Want to learn more about Nulogy Shop Floor? Simply contact us or request a demo and we’d be happy to give you an intro to our award-winning solution.
