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FIELD OF DREAMS: With tracking and tracing systems, Earthbound Farm’s Daniels (left) and Brinsmead are prepared to respond to any product recall.

Word arrives that a product you manufacture is sickening consumers. A common lot number associated with all packages of the problematic product is discovered. How quickly can you determine where every case of that product is, to whom and when it was shipped, or where it is in your supply chain?

How long will it take to identify every other product you've processed that shares ingredients from the same lots that went into the problem product? Or every package that was processed on the same manufacturing line that same day?

Then, how long will it take for you to notify every customer who received that product and arrange for its return and/or disposition?

For some companies, the answer to these questions is mere minutes, followed by hours. For others, it's a giant question mark.

Yet the answer, in extreme cases, can have dire impacts on the health and safety of consumers and on your company's future. As a cautionary tale, witness the fate of Topps Meat Co., Newark, the now defunct, 67-year-old frozen beef patty processor forced to shutter its doors last fall after a botched response to the second largest beef recall in U.S. history.

No one wants to think the unthinkable will happen to them, but as with any form of insurance, no matter how unlikely the hazard, the key to survival and recovery lies in making the necessary preparations beforehand, just in case. No insurance company will sell you a policy the morning after the hurricane.

"In the event of a recall, you can't ever really mitigate the cost of disposing of the product, or the time involved in dealing with the situation. But by providing accurate information to the public in a very timely manner, you can maintain customer confidence that the company is doing the right thing, that you're prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect consumers. Otherwise, you could end up losing your business," comments Will Daniels, vice president of quality, food safety and organic integrity for Earthbound Farm, San Juan Bautista, CA.

The spate of recall stories in the media over the last few years has no doubt raised awareness among manufacturers and retailers of the risks.

"There is certainly much more interest in discussing what needs to be done to prepare. Companies are realizing that being ready for a recall is one way they can mitigate their risk and properly control the event if it occurs," says Gil Hobson, vice president, sales and client services for Carolina Logistics Services, Winston-Salem, NC, which provides full-service recall management among its portfolio of reverse logistics services.

"The best first step in planning for a recall is to develop a recall protocol," he adds. "Most companies have a Plan A-that is, they assume they will never have a recall."

Plan B, which too many firms never get around to, says Hobson, includes creation of a detailed, written recall protocol plan and the staging of regular mock recalls to give everyone who might be involved in a recall a chance to practice their roles. These dry runs also provide opportunities to identify weak points or gaps in the plan that should be remedied as soon as possible.

"Multiple people within the organization need to be included in the planning, which means anyone that is part of the supply chain," Hobson adds. This includes logistics, marketing, sales, finance, legal, IT and quality assurance.

From Awareness To Action

There's heightened interest in recall readiness these days among manufacturers and others in the food supply chain, say vendors of systems and services that help companies prepare for and deal with recalls. Yet there are still big gaps between discussion and action.

"A recall is an event that has low probability and high consequences. It is this type of situation that companies tend not to prepare for properly. From that standpoint, the recall process probably is no different today than in the past. If a company has experienced a recall, they are sensitive to the impact it can have and will typically put procedures in place based on what they've learned. However, if they haven't experienced a recall, there is a high probability that they don't have a protocol or plan in place," Hobson observes.

Even companies that have plans in place tend to focus on preventive measures and on public relations approaches for brands under siege, while operational planning regarding the specific how-to's of product identification, location, retrieval and disposition are often overlooked.

"When it comes to recall readiness, we see a high level of interest in the ability to make it happen," adds Vicki Griffith, marketing director, food and beverage for St. Paul, MI-based Lawson Software, "but how to make it happen is still a hodgepodge of processes. The capability is not integrated into the ways people do business."

On a positive note, the nature of companies' questions about recall readiness is changing," observes Rory Granros, director of industry and product marketing for the process industries, with enterprise software developer Infor Global Solutions, Alpharetta, GA.

"Before, questions tended to be very general and simplistic. Now companies are inquiring in more detail about the track and trace capabilities within software packages in ways that reflect a deeper understanding of their needs and the different elements involved."

It's About Accessibility

With the right IT systems in place, a company presented with a single piece of data such as a purchase order, lot or batch number, should be able to identify the location or disposition of every affected product within minutes if not seconds, says Rob Wiersma, Lawson's industry strategy director for food and beverage.

In reality, for many companies today the process takes many hours or days.

"One common point of failure we see is that while the data they need is all there somewhere and all auditable, the amount of time it takes to plow through piles of paper documents or to combine and reconcile different databases in the face of a recall is what puts them at risk," says Infor's Granros.

The continuing trend toward increased outsourcing compounds the problem, he adds, "because now you have to worry about whether you're getting all the information you need from your outsourcing partners as well and how strong are their track and trace capabilities."

Many manufacturers rely on ERP systems for track and trace functionality, only to discover, when faced with a real recall, the information readily available from the system doesn't extend far enough.

"Lot track and trace capability has to be bidirectional," Granros notes. "If you find a problem with a product at the end of the chain, you need to be able to trace that back to the source of supply. If you find a problem in a batch of raw material, you need to trace that forward to every processed product that material has touched. You always want to be able to go from any point in the chain all the way down to the bottom and all the way back up."

The weakness of tracking systems traditionally operated out of ERP platforms is there are too many places where the "chain of custody" of information breaks down.

"If your strategy is to capture manufacturing data in your ERP system, warehouse data in your WMS and shipping information in your transportation system, then when it comes time to trace something, you have to incrementally work through the data in each of those separate repositories. If you need to overlay data from separate systems, or start comparing lists manually, then the process becomes very time consuming and that's where the chain of custody of the data can really start to break down," Granros points out.

Infor's strategy with its Adage enterprise system, is to integrate the ERP platform tightly with the WMS system, sending lot codes into the WMS that accompany the product data all the way through picking and shipping. It then brings the WMS-related data back into the central repository of the ERP. Similarly, Infor offers an integrated PLM application that enables users to start with their own finished products within the ERP database and trace the constituents all the way back up through the procurement chain.

Another of the system's features is its ability to trace sub-lots.

"This is where a lot of meat packers get into problems, when they can't account for 100 percent of the raw material that went into the product they processed. Whether some fell on the floor and was disposed of, or they packaged 99 pounds out of 100 and then did something else with that last pound, the ability to isolate those odds and ends as sub-lots, and show that you actually controlled them, reduces risk and improves your ability to conduct a thorough recall, if need be," Granros points out.

Chad Collins, vice president, global strategy, for Highjump Software, Eden Prairie, MN, observes that its supply chain Advantage suite is "at its core about tracking and tracing products as they move through the supply chain.

"We're not only tracking SKU numbers and quantities as they move in and out of production and distribution and out to the retail locations, we're also tracking a great deal of additional information like lot codes, expiration dates and manufacture dates. We also have the capability to track such data as freeze and thaw cycles.

"And because this capability in the software suite really starts on the supply side, with procurement, we can also track the raw materials or ingredients as they come from suppliers into the production process and trace all of these components back from the finished, delivered product."

Mobile Computing Extends Traceability

The use of mobile computing systems by delivery drivers further extends detailed traceability of products to the actual point of delivery to the retail location, Collins adds.

"With goods that are sensitive to temperature change at particular points in their cycle, for example in bread distribution, this ability to pinpoint and notate every time a product moved from a frozen to an ambient location, can become important as well," Collins notes.

In fact, these sorts of tracking capabilities, Collins and others point out, not only insure a timely response in the event of a recall. They can also become powerful and versatile tools for helping companies improve many aspects of their manufacturing and supply chain processes, by creating rich repositories of historical data linking ingredients, processes and events with specific product outcomes.

For manufacturers that don't have adequate track and trace capabilities built into their ERP and/or supply chain execution suites, another option now available is a separate "track and trace engine," a piece of software designed to gather needed tracking data from among the many disparate systems where it is resides.

One such product is the Lawson M3 Trace Engine, 3.0, a program first developed and utilized in Europe, which has just been introduced in a version designed for the U.S. market.

Lawson's program is a standalone, web-based traceability system that operates with its M3 Enterprise Management system, as well as with many other ERP, farming or food lab software systems available from other vendors.
In addition to helping companies capture and manage tracking information, from procurement of raw materials through production and distribution, the system includes a web-based application for publishing and sharing data such as product origin and transport information online with customers and regulators.