Let’s imagine for a second that you are required to issue a recall against a product you have manufactured or you’re being audited for particular industry certification such as GMP or ISO – Are you confident you have the systems in place to be able to robustly carry out the tasks required?
Could you ‘hand on heart’ guarantee you have all of the required traceability for your productions and incoming stock, or have any confidence that your carefully crafted quality production instructions are being carried out correctly every time ensuring the quality of your products?
Even if you ‘are’ confident on both counts – it’s always worth considering if anything should be improved to further protect yourself into the future.
It may not be immediately obvious what parts are missing in your quest to QA/Traceability success, so let’s break things down into the basics:
Traceability:
So what does traceability mean for a Nutraceutical Company? Simply put, it means that you should be able to provide:
- A full record of all movements of all stock you hold and have held in the past
- A full record of all productions (of any kind)
- Provide full searchable records of all productions by batch
- Provide full searchable records of all productions which contain specific materials
- Provide full searchable records of all production which contain specific batches of specific materials
- Be able to issue a report detailing any of the above for uses in cases such as recallsAside from the above, you should also have robust and linked incoming purchase order management and quarantine systems to surround your production management.
QA
At it’s very core, QA (Quality Assurance) is the idea behind putting in place a way of preventing mistakes and defects during your productions. It usually is seen as part of an overall desire by the company to improve their offering and is also generally one of the areas audited when attempting to gain approval for standards such as the ISO 9000 framework.
In many cases, real world examples of QA involve setting master production records (a journal outlining the specifics of a production), training manuals and staff training on machines, quality checking at all points throughout productions and a general awareness within the business of the requirement to keep the standard of the outgoing products to a very highest achievable and how to go about it.
How do you fare?
Many of your clients will look to your QA systems and traceability when they are deciding where to place their next business. If you don’t currently have systems in place which meet the above requirements, then you could already be putting yourself at a disadvantage to your competitors! It’s a common issue that GMP and/or ISO certification is seen as a basic requirement by nutraceutical buyers and without complete QA/Traceability systems in-place those standards would be out of reach for many Nutraceutical manufacturers.
How do your systems talk to each other?
If you are lucky enough to be able to say that you DO currently have robust systems in place and are happy they meet the requirement – the next question to ask is – do they communicate with each other? Do they communicate with other possible systems you may be running such as your CRM, your ERP?
In the event of let’s say – a recall – could you automatically generate a list of affected customers within your CRM from the data from your recall report?
In the event of a QA issue – could you automatically inform all interested parties via your ERP what the issue was and how it should be dealt with?
Or would you be reduced to manually syncing your data from multiple systems into a single spreadsheet each and everytime an action needs to be taken?
If any of the above has made you aware of a potential feature gap in your business – now is the time to fix it!
As the director of Receta – an ERP Cloud-based solution specifically designed for the Nutraceutical industry, you’re going to expect me to say that our solution will fix all of these problems for you – and you’re right – Receta will do all of that and more.
However, it’s not just about your choice of software – it’s more about you making the decision that there IS a better way to manage your QA/Traceability AND the initial time spent moving to a better solution such as Receta is time well spent when you consider the long term benefits!
Why not contact us now at info@receta.co.uk and arrange for a free demonstration of Receta? We will arrange a screen-share meeting at a time to suit you and tailor our demonstration to show you the key features which overcome the problems you currently face in your nutraceutical business.