Shipping 1 ½ of my still young career
This and the next few weeks will be fairly hectic. The first beta of my Tracking & Tracing System will be demonstrated at the Victam event which will be held from 11th – 13 th of May. Victam is the global event for supplying the Feed and Food Chain. The system will demonstrating which supplier ingredient lots composed a batch. Which batches did feed a pallet, bin etc? Which batches ran on this particular piece of equipment? What was the effect of this badly performing production line on production and how can we use this information to optimize the next production run? The resulting information by asking these questions against the Tracing System are vital in a calamity scenario. A worst case calamity could for instance be initiated by one of your customers, which reports a problem with delivered goods. Remember the Dioxine scandal?
What we basically do is track information (often referred as Tracking) accumulated from material flows, process inventory and other ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) related functions, quality control, and the batch recipe execution system. Once this information is being analyzed in the higher level tool, Tracing, we are able to reconstruct the product genealogy with all its process, quality, storage etc parameters, and routes the products passed in the value chain. In short we are able to trace a certain set of information which describes a single batch, back to the raw materials it consumed and all in between (upstream tracing). We can even trace further to the previous link in the supply chain (mostly the supplier of raw or prefab materials). We can point our finger and trace downstream to all customers that where as well supplied with “potentially” dangerous finished goods (without lab results which often take days you can’t do anything else other then to execute this aggressive Tracking & Tracing strategy). At the same time we can trace our production lines and pull back prefabs and finished goods still in the production system, clean and publish detailed reporting. The Tracing system is capable of tracing across areas decentralized across the globe (think SOA).
The previously “brief” description of Tracking & Tracing is often referred as executing a Recall 1 and a Recall 2 which I’ll discuss in more detail in a future post.
Both the Tracking and Tracing system are written in C# .NET each containing ten thousand lines of code. I worked for 1 ½ year fulltime on this system and it’s about to see the light! We ditched our test data (primarily used for Unit testing) earlier this week and have been running 24/7 since then with live production data.
Ps: Notice my new summer themed skin