Food and Beverage Traceability and Compliance Suite

The question that decides whether a food business survives a recall is asked on the phone, by a customer or an inspector, and it is always the same: which lots went where, and how fast can you prove it. If the honest answer involves a production diary, a spreadsheet of despatches and someone driving to the plant to read a batch board, the answer is too slow — and the recall widens to everything you cannot exclude.

SAP Business One handles items, batches, warehouses, purchasing, sales and the ledger competently. What it does not do out of the box is think in food terms. It does not know that a case of beef weighs a different amount every time, that a customer contract requires 75 percent of shelf life remaining on arrival, that a finished product inherits every allergen from every component of its recipe, or that a released batch must not leave quarantine until QA signs. Processors bridge those gaps with parallel spreadsheets, and the traceability chain quietly develops holes exactly where it matters.

The Food and Beverage Traceability and Compliance Suite is built to close them inside SAP Business One rather than beside it. ECOSIRE builds it to your process — your recipes, your units, your customers' shelf-life terms, your allergen list, your label formats — as an SAP Business One add-on. It is not a ready-made download: we scope it, quote it, build it, and install it into your test company database first.

Recipes, yield and production

Formulas are held on Bills of Materials with yield, scrap and by-product lines, and versioned through a User-Defined Object so you can see exactly which formula version produced a given batch a year later. Production Orders drive Issue for Production and Receipt from Production against real consumption, not planned quantities, so variance between theoretical and actual yield is a number you can report on per line, per shift and per product rather than a monthly surprise in the stock valuation.

Every issue records the specific component batch consumed. That single discipline is what makes the recall report at the end of this page possible, and it is why the build wires it into the production transaction instead of leaving it as an optional field somebody fills in later.

Catch-weight

Meat, cheese, fish, poultry and produce are sold by weight but handled by case, and the two never divide evenly. The build carries a dual quantity on marketing document lines — cases and kilograms — using UoM Groups and dedicated User-Defined Fields, with configurable tolerance between nominal and actual weight. Pricing calculates on the weight unit while stock and picking run on the handling unit, so a Delivery for 40 cases at an actual 812.4 kg invoices for 812.4 kg and relieves 40 cases from stock. Weights captured at pick or at despatch scale flow into the Delivery and the A/R Invoice without re-keying, and the difference between ordered nominal weight and shipped actual weight is visible on the document rather than discovered when the customer disputes the invoice.

Shelf life and FEFO allocation

Batch master data is extended with production date, best-before or use-by date, origin, supplier lot and quality status through User-Defined Fields. An allocation service then overrides default batch selection on Sales Orders and Deliveries to pick first-expiry-first-out rather than first-in-first-out, which is not the same thing and is the difference between rotating stock and writing it off.

Minimum remaining shelf life is held per Business Partner, and where you need it per customer and item, so the allocation respects each contract. If the earliest-expiring batch will not meet the customer's remaining-life requirement by the time it arrives, the system warns or blocks according to the rule you set, instead of shipping product that will be rejected at the customer's gate and returned at your cost. Expiry exposure — stock value by weeks remaining — is reportable at any point, so markdown and promotion decisions happen before the write-off, not after.

Allergens, specifications and quality release

Allergen, nutrition and specification data is held in User-Defined Tables against items and rolled up through the Bill of Materials, so a finished product inherits every declarable allergen from every component and sub-assembly automatically. When a supplier changes a component, the roll-up flags every finished item affected rather than relying on someone remembering the link.

Goods Receipt POs land in a quarantine warehouse. A quality inspection record, implemented as a User-Defined Object with an SAP Business One Approval Procedure, controls the move to free stock: pass, reject to a blocked warehouse, or release under concession with the reason recorded. Supplier certificate and approval expiry dates are tracked and alerted on, so an out-of-date certificate is caught at receipt rather than during an audit.

Recall traceability

From any batch, in either direction, in one report: supplier and Goods Receipt PO, the production orders that consumed it, the finished batches produced, the Deliveries and A/R Invoices that shipped them, and the customers who received them — with quantities at each hop. The same engine runs mock recalls on demand and records the run: who was contacted, when, quantity produced versus shipped versus recovered, and the elapsed time, stored as an auditable record you can hand to a certification auditor.

Labels, certificates of analysis, allergen declarations and specification sheets print through Crystal Reports with the batch data already on them, from the SAP Business One client or a plant workstation.

Who this is for

Food and beverage processors, co-packers, bakeries, dairies, meat and seafood businesses, and beverage producers running SAP Business One 10.0 who hold batch-controlled stock, are audited against a food safety standard, and currently maintain traceability partly outside the ERP. It applies equally to distributors who do not manufacture but must still prove lot-level despatch and shelf-life compliance.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We walk your process: product families, recipe structure, units and catch-weight rules, shelf-life terms by customer, allergen list, quarantine and release flow, label formats, and the standard you are audited against. 2. Fixed quote. A written scope naming every object, rule and report to be built, with price and lead time. Work starts only on your approval. 3. Build. Typically one working week, developed against the Service Layer and DI API with the User-Defined Fields, Tables and Objects defined as deployable metadata. 4. Install in test. Deployment into your SAP Business One test company database, then UAT against a written script that includes a full mock recall on your own data. 5. Install in production. Scheduled cutover with documented rollback, followed by supervised first production and despatch runs. 6. Support. Two weeks of go-live support are included, and defects in the code we deliver are fixed free of charge, with an optional ongoing support agreement afterwards.

An honest boundary

This suite gives you the records, controls and evidence a food safety audit asks for. It does not certify you, and no software can. Your HACCP plan, your procedures and your certification remain yours; what we deliver is the system that makes them provable in minutes instead of days.