Food manufacturing software

We decided to adjust MRPeasy software for several of our customers from the food manufacturing industry. Having some tips from them we started to learn, what bigger and older “colleagues” offer for the food industry.

After a search in Google, we have refined the typical description for “food manufacturing software”. Even the first link drove us to a professionally styled website with the following information:

“Company X offers a complete food manufacturing software solution for food and beverage manufacturers. Company X’s food manufacturing software functionality includes formula and recipe management, forward and backward lot traceability, scalable batches, product grade management, bi-product and co-product processing, multi-level yield management, private-label operations, and good manufacturing practices (GMP) support.”

What is that? The list of functionalities above contains nothing specific for the food industry.

The most important differences with other industries, when you produce food, are:

• raw materials have an expiry date;
• final products have shelf lifetime;
• sometimes the software may help with the calculation of nutrition content, but this is truly a specific function.

So we decided to implement the following functionality:

• Products have a property “Shelf life (in days)”. It is optional: some products may have it and others may not have it.
• When you create a new purchase order or a stock lot, there is a field “Expiry date”. By default, it contains a value that is calculated based on shelf life, but it can be edited manually.
• In Stock – Stock lots a column is added: “Expiry date”. You can sort or search stock lots by this date.
• When software tries to book stock items (when creating a manufacturing order or booking a customer order), it books only products that are not expired.
• When software tries to book stock items that have an expiry date, it books them not by FIFO, but by expiry date (products that expire first are booked first).
• When creating a manufacturing order, the software automatically calculates Expiry date based on shelf life.
• The software does not automatically delete expired stock lots. These lots can be found in Stock – Stock lots when searching for lots that have expiry date less than today. If they should be deleted, it must be done manually.