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The Importance of Material Tracing

Traceability on a processing or production line is incredibly important, especially when it comes to food products, where having the ability to track every ingredient down to the source is crucial to the health and safety of the consumers.

As parts of the country begin to move out of COVID-19 shutdowns, we have been hearing about “contact tracing” as a tool for containing a secondary spread of the disease. Material, lot tracing, or traceability has been part of producing safe food products for a long time. The concepts behind contact tracing and material tracing are similar.

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Materials and Lot ID Traceability

In the event of a recall can you find everything you need to know in an expeditious way.

As per Wikipedia, “Traceability” is the capability to trace something. In some cases, it is interpreted as the ability to verify the history, location, or application of an item by means of documented recorded identification.

In the process industry, we are required to know the whereabouts of the raw and intermediate materials as well as the finished products. This is paramount since recalls can be impactful to the safety of the consumer as well as financially to the producers.

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Automated Procedures for Manual Processes

Process customers do not need to automate their equipment to start taking advantage of some of the important benefits that off-the-shelf automation products possess. Processes that are typically operated manually can benefit from automating their procedural execution, meaning that the activities that operator typically perform by following printed Standard Operating Procedures can be Specified, Enforced, and Verified in electronic form.

Off-the-shelf products allow us to Specify recipes that can span multiple unit procedures. These can be enforced by prompting the operator or operators of the different areas to perform the required manual activities in the order specified, information normally captured on a sheet of paper or batch log can be annotated and journaled electronically and then this information can be instantly used to make decisions on the active recipe (i.e. adjust the amount of material to be added based on a sample analysis).

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Weighing In Dispensing System

Manual weighing and dispensing tracked electronically.

Automating the dosing of Minor and Micro ingredients is often cost-prohibitive. These tasks are often performed manually by operators that weigh the required materials then dose them to the required destination at the appropriate time. These procedures are typically guided by Paper Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) that are used to track progress and capture required information manually.

These activities can be conducive to errors that are captured downstream after additional value has been added to the raw materials, some of these errors cause batches to be reprocessed or rejected.

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Material Storage Management

Automation Simplified

Managing the reception of materials and its distribution throughout all the storage locations can be a daunting task. Automating this with off-the-shelf products simplifies tremendously the implementation of such a solution. Factory Talk Batch has a component called Material Manager that enables such implementation.

This solution seamlessly integrates the reception of materials into the Plant with the production process. Setting up this solution consist of defining the materials capabilities in Factory Talk Batch. These capabilities are defined by containers, or locations where material can reside, possible materials that can exist in the plant and the possible means of moving material from a source to a destination called Phases.

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Leveraging ISA-88 Standards for Discrete Manufacturing

Tracking manual discrete manufacturing processes can greatly benefit from off-the-shelf products.

Often, discrete manufacturing processes requiring a high level of manual operator activities that rely on paper-based Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to specify how to manufacture their products.

Operators are responsible to perform the tasks as specified by the SOP as well as capturing the required data when requested. It is not uncommon to find plants that have automated components of the manufacturing process but require the operators to input the setpoints before initiating the required tasks. These operators are also responsible for capturing the required data and writing it on the SOPs, some of these SOP steps require capturing a date stamp as well as information of the person that performed a task or captured the data. Some customers require tracking these activities with more reliability and would like to capture information with much greater granularity.

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Recipe version control and released to production functionality

You may already have it — Recipe Life Cycle Management— and don’t know it. Recipe procedures encapsulate the best practices in performing your processing tasks, but are you sure that what is being produced is what everyone agreed to produce?

Who edited it?
Where is the correct version?
Who approved the recipe to be released?

In practice, recipe version control and released to production functionality in plants range from great to sometimes not at all. This can also be true for people using Factory Talk Batch. (more…)