MLBA12: December / January 2010

 

 

 

 

The need for the most reliable traceability systems has never been as apparent as recently when food safety scandals erupted in key food producing countries. Consumers, wary and more assertive this time, want to be fully aware of where their meat is coming from – who prepared them, what was fed to them – among so many other details that were previously not given much attention. The reality of loopholes in the feed-to-meat process was simul­taneously bared in the recent months and this prompted consumers to take a more active role in promoting traceability across the entire supply chain.

 

Lawson, the third largest listed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) company in the world, provides full traceability solutions with its prod­uct, Lawson Trace Engine. The value of this engine lies on its simplicity and fully-integrated functions. Wong Ping Ping, Industry Director, Food and Beverage, Lawson Asia, explains that "a typical food producer has a lot of internal systems which keeps different information – but they are most of the time not linked, like Lab Inspection and MES and Transporta­tions systems that are not linked to the backbone ERP system. Exter­nally there are missing links between the producers system and the sup­pliers' and customers' systems. The Lawson Trace Engine links all these systems together into one single data source."

 

Typical information captured by Lawson Trace Engine are: lot number, expiry date, supplier, farmer, receiving date, QA data, certificates, forwarder, transportation conditions, waiting times, container IDs, ingredi­ents used, lot numbers of these ingre­dients, machine used, storage condi­tions, etc. Wong adds that, "there are a few similar stand-alone products available in the market but none of them come as integrated to any of the major ERP players as Lawson's Trace Engine does with Lawson's ERP system."

 

The engine is not only timely, but is a key to better business operations. Wong notes that the engine's opera­tional benefits include: tracking for­ward and backward from "field to fork," tracing across multiple system platforms (ERP, LIMs, WMS, MES etc), faster tracing and follow up, minimising and speeding up recalls, finding quick reasons for problems and improving processes, reducing preparation time on customer audits to minutes and providing structured way of keeping company quality and food safety information.