Full Traceability Is A Must-Have For Many Manufacturers

Do you dream of making your production processes paperless? You know the burden of paper-based data capture, you may be forced into capturing traceability information, but until now there's been no choice but to record all of that data manually. It's no wonder your production processes are slow and labour intensive.

Tracking back, moving forward

Many industries such as food, pharmaceuticals and aerospace have stringent demands imposed on them to capture and record data related to the manufacturing process. For them, traceability is not an option - it is a legal requirement - and historically the only way to address this is with paper-based records.

Traceability can encompass recording all batches (even serial numbers) of materials used, all batches (packs and pallets) of output produced, and all quality checks recorded at each stage, as well as documenting process events and issues.

The dream ticket is to move towards paperless recording. The ability to capture all this information electronically offers huge benefits to all manufacturing organisations such as increasing the speed of product release, limiting isolations, pin-pointing supplier issues, proving compliance, saving the huge costs of handling paper and gaining agility by being able to get the information needed quickly.

Manufacturers at the head of a supply chain, for example, need to be confident that their own suppliers can identify the scope of any potential issue. An efficient means of tracing production events is vital for any company serious about compliance, continuous improvement, customer service and process efficiency.

But more often than not, instigating a trace is a real chore. It ties up manpower in trawling through different systems and paper archives and then trying to reconcile the records.

Shopfloor-Online MES from Lighthouse is a fully-featured Factory Information System that will track the materials and components used in assembly, the production process, output, quality checks, sign-offs and so on. And it does all this automatically in real time, without choking your business with paper records that need issuing, recording, collating, transcribing into reports, filing and ultimately off-site storage.

Most of these functions are performed anyway as a by-product of monitoring the production process. In other words, the traceability is automated and invisible. For example, every user has to log on to Shopfloor-Online MES, so user-based tracking occurs automatically.

Likewise material usages can be scanned in via bar-codes, bar-code labels can be automatically generated and printed for each lot of output, and quality checks can be prompted, with the data being captured directly from the measuring equipment.

Shopfloor-Online MES has numerous reports to show what has happened on the basis of time, batch, works order, line, machine user, shift or specific event. They can be scheduled in the most convenient way and data can be imported into Word and Excel.

There are few stricter regulatory authorities than the USA's Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Shopfloor-Online MES not only creates the environment in which production is carried out in accordance with its regulations, it complies with FDA CFR Part 11 for the use of secure electronic signatures and electronic records.