Products traceability - Genealogy

In order to guarantee the quality of their products and comply with increasingly demanding legislation, industries must have now an effective product traceability.

Material traceability or product traceability, ,also known as materials genealogy or material flow tracking, traces the transfer of materials within a plant by recording all the attributes of each material and any transformations carried out by assembly, mixing, or chemical reaction. These attributes concern materials (raw materials, intermediate materials, or products), categories (powders, liquids, metal, etc.), properties (density, hygrometry, etc.), supplier batches, quantities, etc.

Particularly important in the agri-food and pharmaceutical industries, product genealogy or ascending genealogy, allows a batch of finished to know the batches of raw materials or components that have been used for its manufacture, as well as all their attributes (supplier, physico-chemical characteristics, etc.). The genealogy of the raw materials or descending genealogy allows with a batch of raw material to know all the batches of finished products that have used it, and thus authorizes in case of problem on a raw material, a blocking of batches impacted or their immediate identification for withdrawal.

Based on an unique concept " Produce, it's traced !", MESbox MTG module can systematically monitor the material flows of an installation by modeling all the equipment containing material (containers), transfers between them and operations (stacking, mixing, transformation). It allows, among other things, to know in real time the shop inventories and their location, and to carry out the ascending and descending genealogy of the products.

If a quality control reveals a defect in a raw material, we have to know what manufactured products have used that supply batch. This is the "descending" genealogy. Conversely, if an abnomality is detected on a batch of delivered product, an "ascending" trace will be desirable to demonstrate a possible anomaly in the manufactuing (defective raw material, inadequate mixing temperature,...).

The MESbox MTG package integrates specialized components to answer these questions without specific development, and provide an immediate response to the user.

If the result obtained by the genealogy of a lot seems unnatural, you have a detailed mode that reconstructs in a tree, all the path of the raw material involved to the final product. Each transformation or transfer operation is identified, with the date and time, the quantity of material concerned, the source and destination equipment. Full routing is provided, even if different names or different batch numbers are assigned to the intermediate materials. This information is stored in a database and can be viewed and archived over long periods of time.

The MESbox MTG pack makes it possible to know immediately the equipments' list crossed by a batch. The search is carried out downstream (batch of raw material) or upstream (batch of finished product). Here again, a detailed mode is available allowing a fine understanding of the traveled path in the installation. Note that the genealogy manages, if this parameterization is retained, the storage in a container equipment of the passga of a contaminating material until explicit validation of the cleanliness of the equipment.