Failure of Peanut Corp. of America, what should we learn??
The peanut butter and peanut paste recall have been considered the largest product recall in history. Nine people have been died & thousands have reported sick due to consumption of PCA products. Questions are being raised about the food safety regulations & quality issue in Supply chain. Is it the system Failure or Greed of few individuals? Is it only the PCA whom to blame? What about the downstream Manufacturer who were using PCA products as their Raw Material? Also, are our Quality regulations sufficient? But the most important question that most Food companies should be asking themselves is this, what to do to avoid the repetition of same in future?
While FDA will do their job to strengthen the Regulations, for food companies, implementation of a good ERP system can be a good start. A best-in-class ERP system provide sufficient checks to ensure quality across supply chain. It also provides traceability to identify and minimize the damage.
HACCP is framework for food safety which ensures identification & analysis of Critical control point in supply chain. Process ERP, like Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM) suite of application from Oracle, are designed keeping in mind specific requirement for Food Industry. ERP help in HACCP certification by providing various Quality management tools for controlling & monitoring of production operations. For example, it is possible to stop further processing until current step is approved by Quality department. In addition, ERP provides full audit trail & standard security feature.
In case of Product Recall, time plays critical role. With Product Recall, it is Company’s reputation that is at stake. The information of contaminated batches must reach to regulation authorities & public as soon as possible. Delay can not only result in severe criminal proceedings, it may end in company going out of business.
Bi-directional Lot traceability is required in Recall. Once Contaminated lot of product reported, either through Customer complaint or through Authority Inspection, the first step to identify the point of contamination. Then, point of contamination can be used as source to find all contaminated batches. Once identified, the next step to identify the customer to whom the lot is shipped. The information should flow to all the affected customers, so that they can identify their contaminated lots of products. Take an example, a manufacturer use contaminated lot in 100 Batches (10 products with 10 batches each). For simplicity we can assume these batches shipped to 20 customers who use it in their 10 batches producing 500 packs each. While total number of contaminated batches would be 200, the actual no of packs will be 100,000. Also, there will be unused contaminated stock lying at manufacturer & its customer site. This is simplified case, in real scenario, these numbers can be huge. Think about the time it will take for company relying on Customized (Generic or Discrete ERP usually force fit to process industries) & Outdated IT systems to identify the all contaminated batches. Also, with data in separate Systems, what’s the guarantee of accuracy? If it’s a Class I recall, just one missed batch may be sufficient to put company’s CEO behind the bar.
With Process ERP, like OPM, where data is available centrally, it’s just matter of few hours to find all contaminated batches & take quick action before situation go out of hand.
With alarming rise in Food Safety Cases & Product Recall, It is high time to look for investment in solid Process ERP which is designed to meet to Industry specific requirement and give you peace of mind!!
