As reports of tainted pet food put product traceability back in the spotlight, ERP supplier SYSPRO Inc. this week announced an upgrade to its Lot Traceability module that enhances a manufacturer's ability to identify the pedigree of its products.
The updated SYSPRO Lot Traceability affords users "one-to-one" tracking between finished products and their component parts. If a toaster is found to be defective, for instance, or a certain batch of dog food causes sickness, manufacturers using Lot Traceability will now have in their system the lot/parent pedigree of each of the toaster components or dog food ingredients.
Users can initiate the new traceability features in the set-up program for SYSPRO's Work in Progress application. Here, workers can specify which lots or serials should be tracked through to the parent part. SYSPRO has also augmented the ability to manage lot and serial numbers and interactions in the work in progress stage. Through the WIP Job Issues and the WIP Lots/Bins/Serials Posting applications, manufacturers can now preassign the serial or lot numbers for a specific parent item that will be conjoined during the kitting process.
"If I start manufacturing an item, I can preassign a lot number or serial number right at the start," explained Brian Stein, CEO of SYSPRO USA, in an interview with Managing Automation. "So on my paperwork, I can say it's lot 123, and then as I go through production, I can always reference that lot number."
To enable the kind of backward traceability that manufacturers or distributors need when addressing issues in the supply chain or among end customers, SYSPRO has also updated its WIP Job Receipt application, which now lets users trace the parent serials or lots to their component serials or lots. This functionality takes the form of a genealogy tree, Stein noted.
"From a recall standard, I now can see every component that went into [a product]. If something was tainted ... I now know all the numbers to look at," Stein explained. With the application's up-and-down search feature, a user can ascertain which end products were affected by the suspect component. A separate inquiry function can then reveal to which vendors the products were sold, which manufacturing plant created them, and which company supplied the components in question.
Stein said the traceability enhancements should appeal to companies in the food and beverage, medical devices, and consumer packaged goods industries, among others. For customers of SYSPRO version 6, issue 10, the new functionality is included in the latest product update, available now.
SYSPRO's own pedigree in the enterprise resources planning space is well-established. Since its founding in 1978, the company has remained squarely focused on mid-market customers. It markets one product -- the SYSPRO suite, formerly IMPACT Encore -- to which the company has added various modules over the years. The ERP suite now covers a cornucopia of functions, from advanced scheduling and production to CRM, accounting, e-commerce, and business intelligence. While the company has developed more than 45 modules, the average number purchased is 14, according to Stein.
SYSPRO's primary marketing strategy is to employ resellers to service the geographies in which its 12,000 customers operate. Stein identified the company's main competitors as Epicor, Microsoft's Dynamics line, Made2Manage, Sage, and a few others. As the ERP mid-market has consolidated around it, SYSPRO has maintained its independence. Suitors have come calling, Stein said, but "at this point we're not interested. We don't want them to take the product and cannibalize it and make it something else."