Last week, members of the TGI team were at the 2017 Wisconsin Cheese Industry Conference in Madison, WI. 2017 marked our fourth consecutive showing at the bi-annual event. While the technology space in general has made incredible strides over the past ten years, and while the technologies cheese and dairy manufacturers and distributors have at their disposal is greater than ever, the fundamental need for complete forward and backward lot traceability has remained unchanged. Read More…
The need to have a lot traceability software system in place with well-defined internal and systematic recall procedures has been around for years, yet the number of small and mid-size manufacturing and distribution companies that still resort to paper, Excel spreadsheets, and other manual methods is staggering. Cheese manufacturers invest incredible sums of money in process engineering, scales, packaging lines, slicers, and other production equipment with the idea that they can improve throughput and output while reducing per unit costs. Unfortunately, even with these improvements, many cheese manufacturers and distributors have been slow to adopt an ERP system with built-in forward and backward lot traceability to serve as the backbone for where such production and lot information will reside.
The cheese industry places a huge emphasis on quality control and traceability and makes every effort to ensure that product that reaches the consumer safe, consistent, and delicious; however, the ways in which cheese and dairy companies go about capturing their production and lot data often depend on too much human intervention and lack process controls to ensure accurate data, and their problems are only getting worse. With the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), cheese and dairy companies are subject to even greater scrutiny and must have systems in place that tie supplier approvals, country of origin tracking, purchases, and lot traceability together, a nearly impossible task without an adequate information system in place.
With Enterprise 21’s fully-integrated supplier relationship management (SRM) and forward and backward lot traceability, cheese manufacturers and distributors can leverage software technology to achieve the same objectives as they do when they leverage equipment technology – increase productivity and reduce per unit costs – all while consolidating all core business information in a single ERP solution.