European Union food companies must abide by strict lot traceability regulations. Tranfield felt that it needed to automate the tracking system to control the product stream from suppliers to end consumers in order to meet these requirements.
Tranfield selected Marcam, a business unit of Invensys, to provide the Protean enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite to help the company achieve its aims. The Protean system will allow Tranfield to implement bi-directional lot traceability, which will eliminate the paperwork from raw material to finished product and enable the company to comply with the new EC food safety guidelines.
"We required a solution that met our objectives to support the development of our product range and key customer relationships, but also was flexible and expandable to accommodate our immediate and future needs," said Mike Hutchinson, Tranfield managing director.
Another recent innovation in meat sector traceability is ScanPlant a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) from Scanvaegt. The company's marketing coordinator, Kasper Granat, sees the concept as the 'missing link' between the overall Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and the shop-floor data collection system.
While ERP-systems are mainly designed to provide companies with financial control, the ScanPlant system is designed to provide meat processing companies with reliable, real-time and accurate data on the shop-floor operation.
"The concept is a basically a business connection between plant systems," he told FoodProductionDaily.com "It can take orders from an ERP system and turn it into a shop floor cooperation. It allows you to control your production line."
Granat believes that many meat processing companies continue to operate with fragmented, inaccurate and non-integrated shop-floor control systems. With traceability legislation coming up, the need to implement a fully integrated and accurate control and manufacturing system will soon be a legal requirement.
Scanvaegt plans to launch the ScanPlant system at IFFA 2004 in Frankfurt, Germany. Marcam is a global solutions providers focused exclusively on process manufacturing.