Traceability in food production is a crucial element of modern food safety and quality management systems. It enables producers, processors, and retailers to track every step of a food product’s journey; from raw material sourcing and processing to distribution and sale.
By maintaining detailed records of where ingredients come from and how they are handled, traceability systems help ensure transparency, accountability, and rapid response in the event of contamination or product recalls. Beyond protecting consumer health, effective traceability also strengthens brand reputation, supports regulatory compliance, and enhances supply chain efficiency, making it an essential component of sustainable and trustworthy food production.
Below is a summary of how De Facto EDP ERP handles traceability, what capabilities we offer, and what this means in practice.
What De Facto Offers for Product Traceability
1. Serial, Batch / Lot / Consignment Tracking
De Facto allows products to be tracked using serial numbers or by batch/lot. This means each unit or group of units (batch) can be uniquely identified.
2.Cradle-to-grave / End-to-end Traceability
De Facto supports tracking a product throughout its lifecycle: from raw or purchased inputs, through production (manufacturing), stock movements, and then shipment / delivery to the customer. This includes supplier origins, internal operations, and onward to customers.
3. Quality Control & Batch Status
Product quality / compliance is tied into traceability: you can record quality control checks, product/batch status, and link these to product groups. So if a batch fails QC, you can trace which products or customers may be affected.
4. Shelf Life, Version Control & Specifications
Support for things like:
- Shelf life / best before / use by (important for perishable or regulated products) can be used to automatically use the correct batches of stock.
- Version control of specifications, drawings, supplier certifications. Ensuring what’s purchased / used is consistent with approved specs, and what is supplied to customers is compliant.
5. Multiple Units of Measure
Often traceability demands knowing in what unit material or product is measured, stored, or transformed. De Facto allows multiple and hierarchy of units of measure, including variable units (volume, weight, linear dimension) or something like “catchweight”. This helps when raw inputs / outputs / intermediate parts are not uniform.
6. Bills of Materials (BoM) & Assembly Traceability
For manufactured / assembled products, De Facto lets you define BoMs (including multiple alternative BoMs), version them, use them in production planning, and thus track what inputs went into a final product. This lets you trace which raw materials or sub-assemblies contributed to each final product (i.e. genealogical trace) in case of defects or recalls.
7. Warehouse / Stock Movements / Transactions
Every movement of stock (in, out, between locations) is tracked. With serial/batch numbers, you can follow the journey of specific batches or units across inventory.
8. Reporting & Visibility
Real-time updates, dashboards, business intelligence, and standard/ad-hoc reports to trace back through the history of a product or batch. Drill-down capability to see where a problem originated (supplier, batch number, production process).
How It Works Practically
Putting together these features, here is how our customers use De Facto for traceability in their businesses:
- When products / raw materials arrive, they are logged in the system with lot/batch or serial numbers, supplier info, certificates/specs and key dates.
- As materials are used in production, the BoM and work orders ensure that each product built references the specific inputs (via batches / serials).
- Quality inspections along the way are logged, failures flagged, batch status updated.
- Finished goods are stored in inventory with specific identifiers, and movements (storage, dispatch) are logged.
- If a defect is discovered later (e.g. customer complaint), one can look up the serial or batch number of the finished good, trace back via BoMs to the input batches and suppliers, check what quality checks were done, and identify what customer deliveries used that batch.
- The reporting tools allow the business to perform recall-type tasks, generate history logs, supplier performance, and ensure regulatory / standards compliance.
De Facto customers in the food industry rely on our ERP software for traceability from producer to end customer. Watch our food industry case studies to learn more.