20 Mar TME® MES Offers Complete Traceability for Industrial Fruit Juice Supplier
Background
An industrial supplier of fruit products processes fruit juices and concentrates. This company produces hundreds of blends of unique fruit and flavor combinations. The fruit products supplier needed to track the precise quantity and origin of every ingredient that goes into their products to maintain a record of the exact recipe and for public health and safety reasons.
The Challenges
With multiple ingredients in every recipe, the fruit product supplier needed to know where each ingredient came from and how much was used. The ability to track their products in precise detail would allow them to fine-tune their recipes. In addition, should there ever be a problem with the quality of one of their products, they would be able to understand exactly which batches had issues. This would allow the company to prevent an unnecessary recall of unaffected products. In addition, the supplier would know which ingredient provider was of concern and immediately address them. The previous method of tracking ingredients was done on paper and the information was manually entered back into the system. This system resulted in many errors.
The Solution
TME® MES (Manufacturing Execution System) by MASS Group captures and manages the genealogy and traceability requirements. TME® MES captures and references a complete genealogy record of products. This includes complete multi-level detail and enables immediate electronic data recall of product, process, resource and asset information. Handheld mobile computers with scanners and advanced data capture options combined with integrated wireless LAN/PAN provide real-time data collection.
The Results
An operator starts with a list of ingredients to pull for use in production of the product. The list of ingredients gets downloaded into a handheld unit. An operator pulls the various ingredients and scans them with the handheld unit as they are pulled and enters the quantity pulled into it. Each ingredient is uniquely identified by its origin. The information captured includes date, quantity, genealogy, manufacturer ID, and product expiration date. The information is stored, managed, and reported using MASS Group’s TME® MES software.
Quality control technicians test the sample of the product and can override the system and tell the operator to pull more ingredients to modify the recipe as necessary. The additional ingredients are then uploaded into the system for an exact accounting of what was included in the recipe. The customer now has complete access to all of their ingredient history and origins. Because the entire system is automated, they have decreased manual labor costs of tracking these items manually, and the chance for error has been completely eliminated.