Optimize Change Management and Manage Products’ Traceability
Change is constant in the consumer goods sector and can affect different aspects of a product development:
- Following new trends which requires to modify a formula/recipe, hence a product’s composition
- Changing suppliers and manufacturing processes which lead to the modifications of recipe/formula and packaging
- New regulations impacting a product formulation or the claims made
- Updating the documentation associated with an ingredient or a product, etc.
The mismanagement of changes can have various impacts on businesses and their product development. Indeed, a poorly done modification can have serious consequences such as thousands of unusable packaging, failing to comply with legislation, and limited ingredients’ traceability. Therefore, effective change management is critical. When changes occur, businesses need to understand and manage all the impacts of each change on products and processes.
However, to manage changes, it is important to understand traceability. Indeed, it is essential to manage and track all information and data of a product, during its entire life cycle, from raw materials to final product:
- Understanding all the different steps of a product development
- Tracking information and changes over time
- Identifying and managing risks
- Analyzing all the impacts of a modification, etc.
Changes and traceability can quickly become difficult to manage. A Product Life-cycle Management software (PLM software) will help you efficiently and effortlessly overcome those challenges.
Change and traceability management with Aptean Food and Beverage PLM Lascom Edition
Aptean PLM offers a unique solution to efficiently handle change management and traceability. The solution supports businesses to reduce potential errors and minimize development delays. It also allows companies to quickly and securely get inputs from the different departments and key suppliers.
Aptean PLM Lascom Edition, through its change management module, can be used to examine all impacts of any change, such as formulation, regulatory, packaging, customer specifications, costs, etc. and then develop simulated versions for validation and approval. This approach greatly enhances the visibility of change impacts, reducing costs, cycle-time, and risk. Using Aptean PLM change management features, decision makers benefit from an overview of impacts and can select which ones they wants to apply. Once a change order is implemented, the repository is automatically updated. The former version is recorded an accessible through the repository. Therefore, the solution provides a complete history of the changes completed, as well as the date and time.
Advanced search tool: apply different filters to refine any search. Filters include ingredients, ingredients origin, composition and content, etc.
Impact analysis: quickly retrieve all data impacted by an event. For example, a health alert arises on an ingredient from Netherlands. It is necessary to quickly retrieve all recipes/formulas containing this ingredient. With Aptean PLM software, the quality expert can easily start an impact analysis to get a list of every product using this ingredient from Netherlands.
Change management tool: version control, impact management, change history.
Automatic calculation tool: re-calculate data impacted by a change. For instance, if the cost of a raw material increases, the tool calculates automatically the new cost of each product affected by this price increase.
