Learn How Production Dynamic Can Improve Your Operations
The Stevens Dynamic Traceability System is our premium, end-to-end traceability system that covers every aspect of your business from goods in through to despatch and waste management. The system can be used for stock management, accurate weighing and supports consistency, quality, and efficiency across all your production stages. A key part of this system is Production Dynamic, which covers all aspects of your production environment such as recipe formulation, weighing, batch reports, and more. As a modular component of our Dynamic Traceability System, Production Dynamic can be added to a system as and when it’s required and has much to offer a business that does implement it within their processes. In this post, we’ll look at 5 key features of the production module and explain how they can be used to ensure high-quality products and improve your operational processes.
1. Stock FEFO Configurations
Save money on dealing with wasted or expired ingredients, because with Production Dynamic you have the tools to make sure your production always uses the correct stock. With the First-Expired-First-Out configuration options available in the production module, you have control over which stock lots are used in recipe makeup. If these are enabled, the system will prompt for the stock that is the next to expire to be used.
The image above shows the different values or configurations available when FEFO is enabled, determining if stock must be the first to expire and if this can be overridden, and by who.
To elaborate on how this affects your production process, let’s say we apply value 2. This means that any stock chosen in recipe makeup must be the first to expire for that given commodity type, this cannot be overridden. We’ve chosen a particular commodity that we want to weigh out, and have our stock lot on hand ready to weigh. However, the lot we have chosen to weigh was the most recent stock in and isn’t the next to expire. When we chose, enter or scan the lot into the system to commence weighing, we are shown an error screen (as shown) that the stock isn’t valid FEFO stock and so cannot be used.
This means that operators cannot proceed with using or weighing lots that don’t meet your chosen FEFO terms. As such, there is no accidental use of the wrong stock leading to confusion and wastage of other stock. You’ll be producing your products using the most efficient and least wasteful method of stock consumption. That results in saving money, time, and resources on dealing with expired or wasted ingredients.
2. Real-Time Stock Consumption
Maintain full visibility over your stock levels in the production process, with real-time stock levels and reduction in the Production Dynamic software built into our Traceability Systems. When using a Stevens Terminal to weigh materials or ingredients, you’ll be shown the current stock level for the lot you’re using in recipe preparation, which decreases as and when stock is used.
With this feature, no matter which operator is using the terminal and when you can be assured of clarity across the board. Not only that but being able to see real-time stock means you can stay ahead of the curve and anticipate low stock levels. You can optimise the ordering of stock to make sure you avoid any low stock warnings and more importantly, prevent stoppages in production due to stock running out.
3. Weighing Tolerances
Ensure product consistency and quality by setting upper and lower tolerances of weighed items in Production Dynamic. When you or your team add a new commodity into the Recipe Manager, you can input details like the ingredient, instructions for this ingredient, target quantity, and both an upper and lower tolerance that you’ll allow when this commodity is weighed. With these tolerances set, an operator would have to be within tolerance when weighing a commodity in order to complete the process.
For example, you add flour to a recipe and set the target quantity to 11.250kg, you set both the upper and lower tolerances to 0.010kg. This means that the amount of flour weighed must be between 11.240kg and 11.260kg for the system to progress to the next ingredient.
This is accident-proof, too. Tolerances are displayed on the terminal screen during the weighing process, and if an operator tries to proceed while over or under tolerance, the screen will flash white to signal that the ingredient is out of tolerance and will not progress to the next step. This makes sure that the ingredients being weighed in your recipes are consistent throughout.
4. Allergen Warnings
Make sure the necessary precautions are taken, with allergen warnings in production. As part of the Stevens System, you can assign allergens to commodities when adding or editing them. For example, when editing our Chocolate Powder commodity in the recipe management software, we can go to the Allergens tab to assign any relevant allergens. In this case, our Chocolate Powder contains nuts and so we need to assign that as an allergen. We can then check the box at the bottom left of the window to display an allergen warning on the terminal.
During the weighing process then this will display an alert on the terminal screen to inform the operator that the material or commodity they are weighing out contains an allergen. The operator is then aware that they need to take any necessary precautions to ensure the proper handling of the product. With these allergen warnings, you can be assured that your products are being produced safely and with the necessary precautions – no matter who is weighing out ingredients.
5. Quality and Assurance Control
Maintain high-quality production standards and results, with the Q&A questions available within the Stevens System. With our recipe management software, you’re able to set various questions at different stages of your production process. These can be used to make sure that operators follow any necessary procedures to adhere to your own quality and assurance guidelines, for example, to check if the area is washed down before makeup or to make sure they’re wearing correct clothing for the task.
The easiest and most popular way of adding these types of questions into your process is as a step action in recipe formulation. For example, in the image, you can see we have added a question as Step 1 that asks the operator “are you wearing PPE?”. At Step 1 this question will show on the terminal (like shown in the image) before any other weighing steps for example, and therefore is a good way of making sure operators are wearing suitable clothing for weighing. Further to this, the results of these questions are shown on the Stevens Reports that you produce for that specific batch so you can ensure that Q&A is being followed correctly.