Achieving reliable recipe control

Archived News:

"Recipe management is one of the major headaches for many manufacturing companies; especially in food & beverage, flavours & fragrances and personal healthcare sectors. Success or failure relies heavily on intangibles as diverse as operator skill & diligence; outdated paperwork systems; use by dates and health & safety issues."

Les Burstow, Systems Specialist, Marco Limtied

True recipe control often relies on the local skill and dexterity of the management team with operators playing a vital diligence role to ensure all the correct ingredients are dispensed and added to the final batch mix.

If you 'take your eye off the ball' in such environments, profits can easily be eaten away, product quality being the victim. All too often factory floor data is unreliable, historic and inaccurate.

Effective recipe control is especially difficult when ingredients go through a number of different processes. These can include transformations such as dicing and shredding, chilling, freezing, cooking and sub batch (BOM within BOM) manufacture. Add to this the pressures from stock control issues and unaccountable losses and it's easy to see why total batch loss and rework is common place without a codified solution to recipe management.

Working with these inefficiencies is clearly not a long term solution. So how do you ensure that all the required ingredients are picked, assembled and mixed in the correct proportion? How do you ensure ingredients are used in strict (FIFO) date order? How do you eradicate waste and rework and effectively manage stocks accurately?

An efficient answer to all these questions underpins Marco's factory floor profitability solutions. Visibility of real time data allows for dynamic, accurate decision making, thereby creating a Measure, Control, Improve culture that ultimately provides product consistency and that all important sustained brand loyalty.

Please email mandy.hart@marco.co.uk for more information or to arrange a site survey.