Stock Rotation policy for bulk dry and liquid products

I am looking for some help. I writing my company's stock rotation policy, we store and distribute packaged product and bulk products. I am able to address the packaged items without any problems but I am having trouble with the bulk items. We have several dry and liquid storage silos and tanks from which we distribute in 50,000 pound quantities. We receive both liquid and dry via railcar( about 200,00 pounds each) and each of our silos and storage tanks hold about 2 1/2 railcars each. There is not a clean break in stock as we only completely empty and clean our storage tanks if their is a micro issue . Can anyone help me? Examples are welcome. 

Sweet_Lew,

I have heard of people in your situation building additional storage in order to have a clean break in their production. They would use one silo until it emptied, then use the other while they cleaned that silo...repeat when silo 2 emptied. Once the silo was cleaned they would begin filling it again, but the second silo gave them the time they needed to fully empty and clean it. Do you have enough storage currently to start doing this based on how quickly you receive/use new product?

The flip-side to building more storage is: How much of your product could potentially be lost if there was a contamination issue with it? What would it cost to recall this amount of product, or what would be the additional costs of lost packaging, employee time, etc.? These are good numbers to use if building more storage is your safest option to achieve that clean break...because that "expensive" storage may be relatively cheap compared to thousands of pounds of lost product.

The blown out of proportions example is: If you produce 6 months of product w/out a clean break and suddenly have a micro problem that triggers a recall (knowing nothing about your product I can't be sure this is a real threat but bear with me) you could have to recall all 6 months of product in addition to the product you found to be contaminated! The argument here would be that the contaminant could be present in very low levels in only a few items of product, but they could pose a serious health risk to the few people who consume them...it is a very slim chance scenario but it has happened before, unfortunately I can't remember the product.

Sweet lew -

Please clarify the nature of those entities interms of Raw or Inprocess or manufacturing additives/agents (not necessarily an ingredient)

If they are Raw or Inprocess have you pontentially identified their respective risk profile. Should they be of high risk or where you have had a good history of micro hits, its certainly worth while considering additional tanks/silos to manage the clean break situation.

Another worthwhile exercise would be to come up with a matrix of Entity: Product usage & cost analysis based on ingredient costs, quantity & micro/contaminant risk profile that would relate to Product recall. Based on which you can justify the need or the lack there of for additional tanks/silos. This would also help agree upon & come up with  the Brackets for traceability/ recall situation.

Along the same lines you can get away with the low risk / no risk agents/additive the way you are handling them right now, as long as you are Ok with bracketing for a longer time frame & more products should you ever get into a recall situation.

Having said the above, if you have for stock rotation (monitoring) purpose alone, what are your current practices around acceptance of a incoming lot. Do you have weighing scales, tank marks/dip scales etc., that you currently use to verify/document the current stock & then fill up with the new lot ? If you do, that can be use in my guess to an extent. Points to remember is also to have a system in place for FIFO or FEFO when the same entity/commodity is stored in multiple Silos/tanks as well. That could further complicate the matter if such a system of documenting the current levels & incoming load dumping & usage decisions.

Hopefully this helped rather confuse your dilemma further.

Regards,

agarsr.