Food & Beverage Compliance and Traceability

The problem this solves

Food and beverage businesses fail NetSuite implementations on the same three things. The first is time: inventory is not fungible, because a lot with nine days of shelf life left cannot go to a customer whose receiving policy demands two-thirds of shelf life remaining. NetSuite's lot-numbered items carry an expiration date, but the decision logic — which lot to pick, which lot to refuse, which customer needs a longer minimum remaining shelf life than the next — is not in the system.

The second is weight. When you sell a case of bone-in product, you invoice by the pound but you ship by the case. Every transaction therefore has two quantities, and pricing, inventory valuation and the packing list each need a different one.

The third is the paper trail. When a recall notice arrives, or an auditor asks, you need to trace forwards and backwards from a lot within hours — which raw lots went into which production run, which finished lots went to which customers, on which shipments. Assembling that from standard transaction searches is possible, and it is not fast.

This build addresses all three inside NetSuite, on your records, without a second system to reconcile. It is built to order: ECOSIRE scopes your product classes, customer shelf-life terms, weight-capture points and quality workflow, quotes a fixed price, then builds and deploys.

What ECOSIRE builds

Shelf life and FEFO allocation

Custom fields on the item record hold shelf life in days, minimum remaining shelf life for shipment, and a separate customer-level override so that a retailer demanding 75% remaining life is enforced automatically while a food-service customer at 50% is not blocked unnecessarily. A User Event and Map/Reduce pair evaluates inventory detail on order fulfilment and pick, ranking eligible lots first-expired-first-out and excluding lots that cannot legally or contractually ship to that customer.

Expiry-driven alerts run as a Scheduled script against a saved search: lots approaching a markdown threshold, lots past minimum remaining life for their assigned demand, and lots that will expire before their allocated ship date.

Catch weight

A dual unit-of-measure model is added — nominal quantity (cases, pieces) and actual weight — carried on item, sales order, item fulfilment, item receipt and invoice through custom fields and a transaction line calculation. Capture points are configured to match your operation: weight entered at receipt, at production output, at pick, or read from a scale integration through a RESTlet. Pricing calculates from actual weight where the item is priced by weight, while inventory commitments and pick documents work in cases, and the variance between nominal and actual is reportable per lot and per shipment.

Allergen, specification and label data

Custom records hold allergen declarations, ingredient statements, nutritional data, certifications (organic, kosher, halal — whatever set applies to you) and country of origin, linked to the item and versioned so that a spec change is a new version rather than an overwrite. A Suitelet renders the current spec sheet for an item, and a saved search surfaces any finished good whose allergen set does not reconcile with the allergens of its assembly components.

Quality holds and disposition

A custom quality hold record can be raised against a lot, a bin, a receipt or a production run. While a hold is open, a User Event script blocks fulfilment, transfer and assembly consumption of the affected inventory. Disposition — release, rework, downgrade to a secondary item, destroy — is driven by SuiteFlow with your approval hierarchy, and each disposition writes the resulting inventory adjustment or transfer with the reason code attached.

Traceability and recall

A Map/Reduce trace engine walks the transaction graph in both directions from any lot: backwards through work orders and item receipts to supplier lots and receiving documents, forwards through assemblies, transfers and fulfilments to customers and shipment references. The output is a trace record plus an exportable report suitable for handing to an auditor or a customer. Because it runs as Map/Reduce, a deep multi-level trace completes without timing out the way a Suitelet-based search would.

Integration surface

RESTlets accept scale weights, label printer confirmations and third-party lab results; SuiteTalk REST exposes the custom spec, hold and trace records to any system you already integrate with.

Who this is for

Processors, co-packers, importers and distributors of perishable or regulated food and beverage products running NetSuite with lot-numbered or serialised inventory. It suits businesses that already track lots but do the shelf-life, weight and trace work manually or in spreadsheets. It is not aimed at businesses selling only ambient, non-perishable, fixed-weight goods — the pack would be largely idle.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We review your item classes, existing lot practice, customer shelf-life terms, where weights are physically captured, your quality workflow and your current recall procedure against your live NetSuite configuration. 2. Fixed quote. A written scope and a fixed price, before any code is written. 3. Build. SuiteScript 2.1 in an SDF project — User Event, Map/Reduce, Scheduled and Suitelet scripts, custom records, custom fields, saved searches and SuiteFlow workflows. 4. Install in sandbox. Deployed to your sandbox first. You run a mock recall trace, a catch-weight shipment and a quality hold on your own data before anything touches production. 5. Production. The tested bundle is installed in production with a documented rollback path. 6. Support. A defect-fix window after go-live covers anything the first real weeks surface.

Typical delivery is two to four weeks from signed scope, with the trace engine and catch-weight capture points being the main drivers of where in that range a given build lands.