Manufacturing ERP built for a variable raw material
Your input quality changes with the season and the supplier, and your output has a date on it from the moment it is made.
What should a food manufacturer look for in an ERP?
Batch traceability that answers a recall in one query rather than in two days of spreadsheet work, shelf life driving which stock ships rather than sitting as a printed date, and yield measured per batch against a raw material whose quality genuinely varies by lot, season and supplier.
Yield moves with the raw material, not with the process
The same line, the same operators and the same settings produce different output from a different lot. Yield has to be measured per batch against the actual input, otherwise a supplier quality problem looks like a production problem and gets solved in the wrong place.
Shelf life is a despatch constraint
Stock is not interchangeable. What ships has to be chosen by remaining shelf life against what the customer will accept, which for organised retail is usually a contractual percentage. A stock figure with no date attached cannot answer that.
Traceability has to run both ways, fast
From a consumer complaint back to the batch, the shift and the supplier lot, and forward from a suspect lot to every customer who received it. FSSAI expects this and a recall does not wait for spreadsheet work.
Weight and count are both real units
Material arrives by weight, output ships by pack and by carton, and the conversion has its own losses at filling and packing. Booking both, and the loss between them, is where the real material cost sits.
Hygiene and changeover eat capacity
A line changeover between products involves cleaning, and that time is capacity you did not use. Booked as its own activity rather than averaged into the shift, it becomes a schedulable thing instead of an unexplained gap.
Batch production and traceability
Batch as the unit, forward and backward tracing between supplier lot, production shift and the customers who received the output, answerable as a query.
Inventory and stores
Shelf life driving despatch selection, weight and count both held with the conversion loss booked, and stock ageing visible before it becomes a write-off.
Production planning and tracking
Yield per batch against the actual input lot, with cleaning and changeover booked as their own activity so capacity conversations are based on real available time.
Quality and traceability
Checks recorded against the batch, so a complaint traces back to a shift and a supplier lot rather than to a date range.
Can Facto trace a food batch back to the supplier lot?
Yes, in both directions. From a finished batch back to the raw material lots and the shift that produced it, and forward from a suspect supplier lot to every customer who received output containing it, as a query rather than a reconstruction.
Does the system manage shelf life at despatch?
Remaining shelf life is held against the stock, so despatch selection can respect what a customer will accept rather than treating every carton as interchangeable. Ageing stock is visible before it becomes a write-off.
How is yield handled when raw material quality varies?
Yield is measured per batch against the actual input lot rather than against a standard. That separates a supplier quality issue from a production issue, which matters because the two get solved by completely different people.
