Coming from a Food and Beverage Manufacturing background the importance of traceability has been engrained into my being. The surprising thing is that for such an important part of the process, it has been consistently overlooked by inventory management systems. Luckily modern systems such as Unleashed have gotten this right, but more on this later.

Many SMEs get by utilizing a combination of excel spreadsheets, Julian dates, and their accounting software. Neither one of these has been designed to be a hub for product traceability. I might be slightly harsh, however, I would argue that any system that allows crucial information to be changed without a proper audit trail is not fit for purpose in today’s digital age.

We need to go back to basics and understand why these systems are needed in the first place. These systems are in place to the consumer safe, and the business out of court. This means that you the business owner needs to be able to trace everything that enters and leaves your factory and every step in between. This will aid in a quick product recall and prevents you from discarding unnecessary products.

As a product recall is extremely unlikely, the most frequent use for this information will be at audit time. Most businesses have at least one auditing organization and in the case of food manufacturing, they will have several others, i.e. Fairtrade, Organic, Rainforest, etc. For the latter section of these auditors, they also require mass balance reports, (a detailed report of all incoming and outgoing transactions internal or external of the products they govern.) which in years past would involve a lot of excel reports, and paperwork.

I always recommend Unleashed Software to any organisation that requires product traceability of any fashion, either be batch-based or serialised, as this is a feature they truly excel. When considering software you always nee to consider that having all this information is only as good as our ability to recall it in a timely fashion.

Based on my past experience dealing with audits, pre Unleashed the traceability and mass balance section of the audit would take between 1-2 hours.

With Unleashed all this information is conveniently stored on the product page itself. Which allows us to cut down this section of the audit from 1-2 hours to about 15 minutes. These features really brighten up an auditors day, and if you know you know.

Additionally having a native Xero integration, you can really take your game up to the next level. Whenever any goods come in you can scan; the signed delivery notes, invoices and good inwards checks stored and upload them ot the invoice on Xero which will link directly on to the purchase order on Unleashed, allowing you to access ALL documents in seconds.