Overview

The full business edition of ProdTrac is applicable to a business needing to manage manufacturing operations either in addition to, or in place of, buying and selling operations. It includes modules that professionally organise and direct the complications of product assembly, identification and tracking:

Key Business modules included

• Forecasting & Planning Raw Materials traceability
• Shelf life, rotation & stock management
• Pricing history – for raw materials, suppliers and customers
• Invoicing control and systems for speeding up payment
• Cash flow management
• Customer relationship management tools
• Reduce your insurance liabilities because you can prove traceability instantly and accurately
• Save time and money gathering business, manufacturing, technical and costing information via instant reporting.

ProdTrac also controls

• Purchasing to invoicing operations/Links with Accounting Systems
• Complete Business and Manufacturing Costing Analysis
• Full Stock Management including Location and Transfer control
• Shelf life Rotation Control
• Bar-coding and scanning operations
• Recipe Management and Costing
• Production Planning with automated batch control
• Recipe Weighing
• Product Assembly
• Production Batch Control
• Complete 100% traceability, forward, reverse and sideways
• Complete Allergen and additives traceability and control
• Complete nutritional control and labeling
• HACCP/BRC Control
• And much, much more……………

The ProdTrac software system is not just a technical program for use by the technical department of a business. It has been deliberately developed so that it is of value and benefit to all areas of the business. While the Technical Manager might be primarily interested in the quality characteristics of a batch of goods (temperature, condition, shelf-life and so on), the Production Manager has alternative interests in that same batch (quantity, pack format), and the Buyer or Accountant wants to know about price, stock value, supplier performance, etc. By sharing all this information in a single batch record, this can be handled and reported in many ways that are of value to all aspects of the business.

Because the program operates on a centralised real-time database, everyone is working with the same information. Each time a transaction occurs – placement of a purchase order, receipt of goods, manufacturing of a multi-component product, allocation and despatch of products to customers – the stock levels of relevant batches are automatically adjusted in the database. This means that stock holdings, stock valuations and all associated costings are always current.

There is always a need to trace the origin and destination of products. ProdTrac manages this, including instances where there may have been a change in packaging format or case quantities.

Recipe Management and Production Planning

The database holds recipes for all products, with the option to store approved alternative recipes for a product. The cost estimates of all recipes are based on the current price of ingredients, and so the picture is always accurate. This means that it is possible to switch to an alternative recipe to take advantage of movements in the price of ingredients.

Small manufacturers often prefer to make to stock without the need for a formal production plan. But if it is preferable to produce to order, the active recipes can be used to drive the management of production batches. Manufacturing requirements can be entered into a production schedule, or alternatively the plan can be automatically created from the sales order programme. The recipe base is used to automatically calculate all materials requirements, current stock holdings and purchase deliveries due, to ensure that the plan can be met. And the key to accurate traceability is that when a production batch is manufactured, the individual ingredient batches used and their actual quantities are recorded in the database. This level of detail means that you can immediately, from any screen in the program, trace the full movement history of any batch of ingredient, intermediate product or finished product.

Allergens Control

There is a legal obligation to label allergens contained in products. The ProdTrac program has the ability to help manufacturers with this, and the full business edition includes an option to trace the movement of allergenic materials through recipes and product manufacturing.
When a recipe is developed or modified on the system, the program will immediately show all allergens contained in that recipe by drawing on information held in the ingredient records. This takes the legwork or guesswork out of labeling decisions by reliably showing the allergens that must be declared on the finished product. The allergen-tracing feature also works through individual production batches, to identify any allergens contained in any chosen batch of a product.

User Restrictions

Every module in the program can be password protected to restrict access by individual users – no access; read only; or full read and update permission. This gives full safety control because, although all users are accessing the same database, only the technical management personnel can control the accessibility of individual batches of ingredients or products. If a batch has not been released as acceptable for use, it cannot be selected in any other menus in the program.

Password protection gives similar constraint over other critical control points such as approved supplier management or recipe management.

Data Collection

With any database system, the accuracy and value of the information displayed or reported from it is dependent on the regular entry of routine records. It is important that the business and all users recognise the responsibility that everyone has in this respect. In return, ProdTrac helps in two ways:

• We make data entry as easy as possible. All screens are pre-populated with details direct from the database, leaving only the minimum of information to be entered by a user. Screens are ergonomically designed to be user-friendly, and there are helpful prompts and automatic validation to assist wherever possible
• We provide valuable reports and screen displays. This is to ensure that however much time might be needed by a user to enter data, that the time is saved many times over by the provision of instant results. There is no longer a need for administration or management to spend time entering data into a spreadsheet to calculate information. The answers are all immediately available directly from the database. With the incomparable advantage that the information is always 100% accurate and up-to-the-minute. This is the real value of using a commonly-shared database

Business Management

As mentioned in the introduction earlier, the quality and safety management aspects of the program are integrated with in-built business functions.

• The Purchasing Department can immediately review the status of business with suppliers – what deliveries are outstanding or overdue, what value of goods has been received in acceptable condition, which purchase orders have been fully completed and are due for payment
• Warehouse or Production Management can review inventory holdings and shelf-life rotation, with accurate real-time stock valuations. And the process of routine regular physical stock checks is automated as much as possible
• Sales Order Processing is simplified to assist tele-sales operation, and selling prices for individual products to individual customers can be immediately updated at the time of ordering. The program manages the allocation of specific product batches to customers, and the sales order details can then be transferred to automatically create customer delivery notes and invoices

The fact that all of these details are captured and stored in the database means that valuable reports can be drawn to show, for example, trading histories with suppliers or customers, profit margin values, material usage or wastage, and production graphs.