If you’re part of a regulated industry supply chain, whether it’s pharmaceuticals, chemicals, or food, traceability is a necessary evil. Governing bodies and codes of practice regulate the industry to ensure standards are implemented for consumers. Examples include the FDA’s Code of Federal Regulations Title 21 (CFR) and Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMPs), the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), and the BRC Global Standards.
Just saying “batch traceability” sounds really easy, but in reality it’s a complex, multidimensional business issue that touches all parts of the enterprise and should be managed in a holistic manner.
We all hear the term big data, with its loose definition of large volumes of data and its related problems with data capture, storage, search, analysis, and visualization, to name but a few. But depending on the industry, product, customer, and user, big data problems tend to be specific to you!
Searching through batch records and other related data can take time, with input from different departments, when trying to understand cause and effect during a real-life recall or a BRC audit. But with the paradigm shift created by SAP HANA, data visualization and predictive analytics totally change the way users consume data and analyze business problems.
Visualization is the optimum way to view data, dramatically increasing visibility to help identify hotspots, while predictive analytics can provide early warning of problems before they arrive, reducing the time and cost of making timely and informed decisions.
An example of visualization would be a traceability dashboard, or plotting the customers who received the defective batch on a Google map. An example of predictive analysis would be trending customer complaints that indicate a potential product recall.
CompuTec ProcessForce already provides relationship map visualization to tackle the topic of batch traceability. For example, it has helped UK food and beverage producer Evolution Foods support their BRC requirements.
With the introduction of 360 Traceability, this SAP HANA-based solution will take the traceability topic to another level. It is planned for release on SAP Business One 9.1, version for SAP HANA. Watch this space over the coming months for an update on this revolutionary industry solution.
