Product Management

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT.

Manufacturers are required to hold a wide range of product related information for both internal and external uses. They must prepare product information for customers and regulatory authorities in various forms which involves compiling information held in spreadsheets or document formats and ensuring the information is accurate at all times.

BOM. RECIPE. LABEL. PIF.

BILLS OF MATERIALS: These hold the raw materials and sub-assemblies that make up the components that are required to make a final product.

RECIPES: In food and beverage industries, recipes define the ingredients required to make finished products in terms of batch sizes and percentages of ingredients required.

LABEL DATA: The manufacturing system should have the ability to store all information required for all required bar coding and labelling requirements.

PRODUCT INFORMATION FORMS (PIFs): The requirement for product information to be provided in a standard industry accepted format e.g. Australasian Food and Grocery Councils PIF 6.0 format.

BOMS AND RECIPES.

The manufacturing systems should be able to specify how a product is made in a comprehensive manner by providing the ability to hold:

A multilayered structure of all Finished Goods, Work In Progress and Raw Materials and have it graphically displayed in a tree structure.
Each stage, operation or route, the standard setup times, run rates, process instructions and rules.
Revision control tracking versions and release processes.
Multiple units of measurements and tracking levels.
Multi-level cost types support up to 5 different cost types to provide effective cost control and budgeting.
Ingredients, processes, labour and outwork defined at any layer of the recipe.
Unlimited levels.
New product recipes defined in terms of production or laboratory design\test sizes.
Quality data and critical control points (CCPs) defined on any product at any process stage and at any level.
Allergens and Country of Origin identified and are rolled up through the product layers to be available for immediate reporting and labelling of finished products.

LABELS.

Computer generated labels and related bar coding is almost always used in a modern manufacturing operation. When batch tracking is an added requirement, the use of barcodes become even more important to accurate and efficient processing.

Labelling information should be held as part of the integrated manufacturing system, so that the variable information can be entered once and used for automated printing of the labels on all forms of packaging. Information that is held in separate systems (i.e. multiple spreadsheets) introduces obvious potential points of failure.

GS1

GS1 provides the global standard for defining products that are traded between multiple parties.

The Food and Beverage industry have extensively adopted GS1 standards and most retailers require all suppliers to comply for both labelling and electronic trading. Because of this, it makes sense for Food and Beverage manufacturers to adopt the GS1 standard throughout their supply chain and also for internal tracking purposes.

The disciplines GS1 compliance enforces, is a good platform for growth and adoption of automation technology. For example, they publish policies on when a new unique number should be used and when and how to track logistical units.

RFID

The use of RFID technology has increased over recent years however, and the price of the RFID tags in various forms has dropped dramatically. It is still costly to implement a dedicated network with all the RFID read points required for implementation of a comprehensive system.

Also adding momentum to RFID introduction is the emergence of a number of technologies that not only identify the product or container but enables the product to be securitised. More in the Chain of Custody section.

SUPPLY CHAIN.

INTEGRATED PRODUCT DATA FORMS THE BASIS OF EFFICIENT OPERATIONS

A comprehensive manufacturing system should support the ability to hold a wide range of information against the product code and track the changes of that information when the product is changed and updated.

Doing it once and doing it right pays huge dividends in terms of accuracy and efficiency.