A mock trace that eats two days
Your auditor or a customer picks a finished product batch and asks where every ingredient came from and where every case went. The team gathers intake sheets from the goods-in folder, production sheets from the line, the despatch notes from the transport office and whatever is in the stock spreadsheet.
Then someone sits with all of it and follows the numbers by hand. Handwriting has to be read. A lot number was written against the wrong date. A part-used sack went back into stores and its number was not recorded when it came out again.
The links are not written down together
Each department keeps good records of its own step. Goods-in records the supplier lot. Production records the batch. Despatch records the delivery. The trouble is that the link between them depends on the lot number being copied correctly from one sheet to the next, by hand, on a busy shift.
- Intake lot numbers are copied onto production sheets by hand.
- Part-used ingredients return to stores without a clear record.
- Rework and carry-over batches are hard to trace forwards.
- Despatch notes list products and dates but not always batches.
What the paper trail costs
Trace exercises take senior people off the floor for hours or days. Customer questions about a specific batch are answered slowly. And the effort needed to find anything means the records are rarely checked until someone asks.
We do not advise on what your trace records must contain or how fast they must be produced. Your technical team and your certification scheme set that. We make the records quicker to capture and to search.
A record system that links as you go
- Goods-in scans or enters each supplier lot on a tablet, printing an internal label with its own code if you use one.
- Production records which lots were issued to which batch by scanning, including part-used containers returned to stores.
- Rework and carry-over are recorded as inputs to the next batch, so the chain stays unbroken.
- Despatch records the batch codes on each pallet or delivery, linked to the customer order.
- A trace screen follows the links in either direction: from a supplier lot to every customer, or from a customer delivery back to every supplier lot.
- Records can be exported in the format your team uses for audits and customer requests.
| Step | Captured | Linked to |
|---|---|---|
| Goods-in | Supplier, lot, date, quantity | Internal lot code |
| Issue to production | Lots used, quantities | Production batch |
| Production | Batch code, output | Finished stock |
| Despatch | Batches per pallet | Customer order |
Where you already run an ERP with lot tracking, we connect to it rather than duplicating it, and fill in the steps that are still on paper.
After the change
The trace exercise becomes a search that someone checks, not a two-day hunt. Records are legible and dated. And because they are easy to look at, gaps show up in the week they happen rather than at the audit.
Goods-in staff spend less time writing and the production team is not asked to copy long lot numbers under pressure. Supervisors can see at the end of a shift whether any batch is missing an input record and chase it while people still remember, rather than discovering it weeks later.
Could this be your site?
- Trace exercises involve gathering paper from several departments.
- Lot numbers are copied by hand between sheets.
- Part-used ingredients are a known weak spot in your records.
- Customer batch queries take hours to answer.
- Your ERP tracks lots, but not every step feeds it.