Recipe Management

ProdTrac software can assist food businesses to meet legal requirements:

• It can automatically compute the ingredients list for a product, taking into account multiple stages of manufacture
• It will include and highlight the presence of any allergens in a product’s ingredients
• It will automatically calculate the nutrition profile of a product using the nutritional values of its raw materials
• It can provide an almost instantaneous summary of the traceability of any raw materials or products. This information is invaluable for timely decision making in the event of a food incident or product recall.

The recipe management module – called Assembly Lists in ProdTrac – is used by the program in various ways:

For the technical user, it records and controls the recipes that must be used in manufacture. This enables the identification of allergens that are, or may be, contained in ingredients and so should be labeled on finished products. It can calculate product nutrition profiles from raw material nutrition data, and can compute proposed ingredients lists based on the current assembly lists.

In production, recipes can be used to analyse production plans and/or sales order commitments, to calculate manufacturing raw material requirements. Based on existing stock levels, ordering minimum quantities and lead times, ProdTrac can advise purchasing requirements to meet planned productions. The current recipes also drive the production run recording system, to advise on raw material requirements and the shelf-life rotation of batches in stock.

For costing purposes, all assembly lists can be instantly costed based on current raw material costs and man hours to produce. The program can indicate where recipe costs and/or selling prices are returning required profit margins and will highlight all instances where costs and/or selling prices need to be revised.

Any assembly list can be taken out of use to be archived, but is always then available to be brought into use in the future. Alternative assembly lists can also be maintained for the manufacture of a product, with only one being identified as the current default, or live, assembly list to be used.

Finally, assembly lists can be “stacked” through an unlimited number of stages, meaning that the output from one or more production steps can be the input to a subsequent production process. In this way, complicated assembly operations can be built in a logical way to mirror actual manufacturing processes.

The following screenshots illustrate a sample of these features: