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Traceability and the Put-Away Process

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Victory76

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Posted 09 December 2022 - 03:11 AM

I am a manager in a distribution center that stores items such as canned goods, cereals, candy, cookies, pasta among other things. Everything is packaged and sealed when it is received. I don't carry any fresh produce or meat. All of my product is stored on the floor on pallets.

When the product is received the dates (mm/dd/yy) are written with a sharpi on all four sides of the pallet. The receiving personal have a difficult time discerning the lot numbers because we deal with such a wide array of products and many products have a date and time stamp as lot numbers. The easier process for traceability seems easier and more reliable by using the product expiration date as opposed to the lot number. Before me I think the employees would put the pallets away by the month in which they expire, FEFO. I have instructed my folks to put away based on the actual expiration date as opposed to the month they expire. I have gotten pushback on this particularly when I receive two pallets of something that is dated so it would need to be positioned in the middle of a product that already has 90 pallets in inventory. It is quite a task and requires a great deal of my limited resources to pull out 70 pallets simply FEFO two pallets.

To complicate things, I have a very manual picking process. A paper order is generated with a upc, quantity, and expiration date amongst other information. This paper and the system has no idea if the proper date was pulled and our WMS relieves whatever product has the date printed on the pick sheet. Traceability is an incredible challenge with these tools.

My questions:
1) Is it compliant for me to compartmentalize my FEFO simply using the month of expiration vs the day of expiration? I could do the same with the picking process. The pick sheet would identify the month of expiration and as long as the order selector got something for that month they would be good to go.
2) I get the impression that other distribution centers don't take this as seriously as I do because I get BOLs/packing slips on a regular basis that do not have any dates or lot numbers on them so I have no idea how DCA that send us product maintain traceability. Is impression wrong? I understand that it still doesn't make it right if everyone is doing it.

Is the grocery industry just low risk and so the proper emphasis is not put on traceability and FEFO?



Tony-C

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Posted 09 December 2022 - 04:53 AM

Hi Victory76,

 

It would appear to me that you are trying to overcome a problem generated at Goods-In. Are you not able to manage that process such that you receive stock in expiry date order?

 

My other question would be who are your customers and what do they require in terms of traceability?

 

I personally don’t see that using a monthly expiry date as being a major problem, what it could mean is that should there be a problem and need to recall you will need to recall a whole month’s product rather than a specific expiry date.

 

Kind regards,

 

Tony





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