Batch and Serial Traceability

The problem: you can trace it, but not in the time a recall gives you

SAP Business One records batch and serial numbers correctly. Every allocation is there — on the Goods Receipt PO, the Production Order issue and receipt, the Delivery, the A/R Invoice. What it does not give you is the single question a regulator, an auditor or a customer actually asks: which finished goods contain this raw-material batch, and who did we ship them to?

Answering it today means opening the batch transaction report, noting where the batch was issued, finding the production orders, listing the output batches, then repeating the exercise one level up — and again for every subsequent level. In a two- or three-level bill of materials that is hours of clicking, done under pressure, by whoever happens to be available. Expiry is the same story: SAP knows the expiry date on the batch attribute, but nothing stops a picker allocating a batch that expires before the customer will consume it, and nothing tells you on the 12th of the month what is going to be worthless on the 30th.

For food, beverage, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, chemical, automotive and medical-device businesses this is not a reporting inconvenience. It is the difference between a targeted recall of four customers and a precautionary recall of everything you shipped that quarter.

What ECOSIRE builds

We build a traceability add-on that sits inside your SAP Business One company database and reads the same batch and serial allocations SAP already holds — no shadow data, no re-keying, no parallel truth.

Forward and backward genealogy in one action

Select any batch or serial number and get the complete tree in both directions:

• Backward — from a finished-goods batch down through every Production Order component issue, every Goods Receipt PO, every supplier, supplier batch, delivery note reference and receipt date.
• Forward — from a supplier batch up through every production level to every finished batch, then out to every Delivery, A/R Invoice and Business Partner that received it, including quantities and ship dates.

The tree is expandable, exportable, and drillable straight back to the underlying SAP document.

Recall and mock-recall reporting

A recall report takes a batch, serial, supplier, date range or item and produces the affected-customer list with contact details drawn from the Business Partner master, quantities shipped, document references and remaining on-hand stock by warehouse. Because auditors ask you to prove the process, not just own it, the same tool runs as a mock recall and records the exercise — who ran it, when, over what scope, and how long the trace took — in a User-Defined Table so you have evidence for your next certification audit.

Expiry, shelf life and FEFO

We implement first-expired-first-out allocation logic on sales and production picking, with rules you define: minimum remaining shelf life at dispatch, customer-specific shelf-life agreements held in a Business Partner UDF, and hard blocks or approval-gated overrides when a picker tries to allocate a batch that fails the rule. Expiry dashboards show what expires inside 30, 60 and 90 days, by warehouse and by value, so the commercial team can act while the stock is still sellable.

Quality status and holds

Batches carry a status — released, quarantine, on hold, rejected — held in UDFs with a User-Defined Object driving the permitted transitions and an approval procedure governing who may release. A held batch is excluded from FEFO allocation and flagged if anyone attempts to ship it. Certificates of analysis and supplier documents are attached against the batch record so they surface in the genealogy tree rather than living in a shared folder.

Reporting your auditor will accept

Output is delivered both as an in-application view and as Crystal Reports layouts you can print, PDF and archive — because in an audit or a recall the deliverable is a document, not a screen. Reports include full genealogy, affected-customer lists, batch status history, expiry ageing and the mock-recall log.

Technical fit

Built for SAP Business One 10.0 on Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA, on-premise or cloud-hosted. Data access uses the Service Layer for reads and writes and the DI API where a document operation requires it; genealogy traversal runs as optimised queries against the standard batch and serial transaction tables so the tree resolves fast even on deep bills of materials. All added structures are UDTs, UDOs and UDFs inside your company database, so they are covered by your existing SAP backup, authorisation and upgrade path.

Who this is for

SAP Business One sites in regulated or recall-exposed industries — food and beverage manufacturing and distribution, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, specialty chemicals, automotive components, electronics and medical devices — that already use batch or serial management in SAP but cannot answer a traceability question quickly enough to satisfy a customer audit, a certification body or a genuine incident.

If you do not currently run batch or serial management in SAP at all, say so at the scoping call. Turning it on properly is a prerequisite and we will scope that work honestly rather than build genealogy on top of data that does not exist yet.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We review your item masters, batch and serial setup, bill-of-materials depth, production process, the regulatory standard you are audited against, and the exact reports you must be able to produce. 2. Fixed quote. A written scope with a fixed price and delivery date. No work begins before you approve it. 3. Build. Developed against your data structure — your BOM levels, your UDFs, your item groups — not a generic demo company. 4. Install in test. Installed into your test company database and run against your real historical batches, so you can compare the genealogy output to a trace you have already done by hand. 5. Install in production. After sign-off, installed into the production company database, with the first live mock recall run alongside your quality team. 6. Support window. A defect-fix support period from go-live, extendable afterwards.

Typical lead time is two to four weeks from approved quote, driven mainly by bill-of-materials depth and how many Crystal Reports layouts are in scope. This is a build-to-order add-on: there is no pre-built binary to download and no trial version, because the genealogy logic is fitted to your production structure before it is written.