Batch traceability and efficient reporting with the ORBIS Mill Solution

Batch traceability – Shining the Spotlight on Quality and Safety

Companies face a tough challenge: being able to continuously track where their products are coming from and what route they have taken. Without total traceability, they run the risk of quality issues, recalls, reputational damage, and legal consequences. It becomes difficult to ensure transparency and guarantee compliance with legal requirements particularly in complex supply chains.

Imagine being able to track at all times where your products are coming from and where they’re going – that’s exactly what traceability makes possible. Batch traceability is an integral part of modern production and supply chains. It enables companies to identify and track every single batch of a product without any gaps whatsoever – from raw materials procurement and manufacturing to delivery. Such transparency is crucial to ensure product quality and safety and to meet legal requirements.

Why is batch traceability so important?

In sectors such as the food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and manufacturing industries, traceability is more than just a regulatory requirement; it is also a central factor in ensuring customer trust. When quality issues or recalls occur, batch traceability enables companies to respond rapidly, identify affected products, and minimize risks.

Advantages for companies

• Rapid response to recalls: Immediate identification of affected products when quality issues or recalls occur
• Compliance with legal requirements: Meeting all legal requirements without any additional effort
• Greater transparency and trust: Ensuring safety and traceability at all times
• Optimization of production and delivery processes: Better control over the entire supply chain

So batch traceability isn’t just a safety tool; it’s a strategic efficiency and competitiveness lever too.

Methods and technologies

Modern batch traceability systems rely on digital solutions like ERP and MES systems that capture and process data in real time. Technologies such as barcode scanning, RFID solutions, and IoT sensors ensure precise capture along the entire value creation chain. What’s more, analytics tools enable evaluation of large volumes of data to identify patterns and continuously optimize processes.

The ORBIS Mill Solution has its very own batch management logic, enabling storage of many defining batch characteristics and allowing users to find them again in a targeted and convenient manner. In the metal industry in particular, quality is described using a variety of quality characteristics, which are then used in the logistics processes to allocate the appropriate batches to the objects of the individual customer requirements. Recording of batch characteristics and total traceability are conveniently supported. This data can also be transferred to a Business Intelligence system at any time. For more information about our Business Intelligence systems (based on the SAP system), please refer to the usage information for SAP Analytics Cloud and Embedded Analytics.

The ORBIS Mill Solution also enables flexible feedback for processes in manufacturing orders. It can be used to record and monitor times, events, quantities, technical data and QM data in a simple and elegant manner. This also applies to enterprise resource planning, because the inventory (such as goods receipts and goods dispatches) can be posted at the same time too. Additionally, the characteristic recording options are optimally supported in both logistics and production.

The ORBIS Mill Solution covers everything related to batches and attaches particular importance to batch tracing, batch management and batch determination. With our digital solution for the metal and steel sector, not only do you learn relevant details about a specific batch, particular products or individual batches; you can also interpret and assign new batches with ease. Additionally, batch traceability is guaranteed and gives you a holistic overview of your goods. You can easily view your inventory and determine which warehouse your material is located in or if your material needs to be transferred.

The ORBIS Mill Solution is fully integrated into SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA and accesses all the SAP processes. Without redundant data storage and interfaces. The advantages of complete SAP integration are also evident in two other areas: automated generation of master data in SAP, and a holistic overview due to cockpits.

The ORBIS Mill Solution Steel solution offers several cockpits that SAP standard functions are grouped together in for the sake of a better overview and user-friendliness. This saves time and also tells the user everything they need to know need for decision-making and processing activities at a glance.

All the activities can be performed in order, dispatch and detailed planning cockpits. The detailed planning cockpit sorts the specified requirements and pools parallel customer orders into a single work order. The user can easily search specifically for the required batches, make selections at characteristic level using individually adjustable search criteria and, if necessary, carry out or supplement order chaining, and add or remove processes depending on the quality and quantity found. Additionally, batch traceability is provided throughout all the processing stages.

The ORBIS Mill Solution creates master data (material master, bills of materials, routings, etc.) in a time-saving manner and reduces the maintenance effort by automatically filling standard fields. The basis for this is provided by sets of rules for deriving standard values using grades, tolerances and thresholds for all the values of the company certificates or our own laboratories, and also by sets of rules for bills of materials, routings, inspection plans, packaging rules and quotation costings.

Company and division managers need to be able to access relevant information both quickly and efficiently if they are to make the right decisions. During this process, it becomes clear that not all companies can effortlessly obtain the figures needed from the existing SAP ERP systems – not by a long shot.

The ORBIS Mill Solution collects all the process and material flow data in the ORBIS Mill Solution object file and offers a number of integrated evaluation and display options.

Using special user exits built into the program structures provided by SAP, all the key batch data is collected in real time and updated in our object file . This means the relevant batch management data can be accessed more quickly and can be made available for evaluations. Not only does that apply to characteristic values; it also concerns logistical batch data too.

For further dedicated reporting, all the relevant information can be transferred to a central SAP Business Analytics solution – starting with classic reporting (formatted and ad-hoc), dashboarding and visualization options, to analytics tools with an Excel frontend, not to mention integrating reporting into the mobile world (i.e. mobile data acquisition on an iPad or another type of tablet). For more information, please visit our SAP Business Analytics overview page.

ORBIS Mill Solution stands for greater transparency, enhanced efficiency and more possibilities that contribute to the success of your business and meet your requirements. Would you like to learn more about the ORBIS Steel solution and the advantages it offers? Feel free to contact us and arrange an appointment with us!

All product-specific requirements – in particular the consideration of thresholds from various metal-dependent standards and common cutting of different dimensions – are fully integrated into the SAP system.

The high demands encountered in product tracing were implemented particularly effectively by means of continuous labeling and identifying scanning from goods receipt, consumption and inventories, to shipping and transport. So each history can be displayed in full. The solution can be supplemented with individual data structures and derivation rules so you can increase your edge over the competition.