The recall drill that came back at 400 pallets

A refrigerated prepared foods manufacturer runs two plants and about 700 people on $210M in revenue, making dressings, dips, and salads mostly under two national grocers' private labels. It runs Microsoft Dynamics NAV for inventory and orders, with SPS Commerce handling retail EDI.

• A national grocer's mock recall took three people three days and returned a boundary of 400 pallets, the smallest number they could prove, though the kettle room knew the real answer was closer to 40
• Blend lots were written on paper tickets and keyed in days later, sometimes on Friday for the whole week, long after the tank had been cleaned, refilled, and emptied twice more
• Good product was scraped and added back into the next day's batch with no note of its origin, breaking the trail at rework
• Quality owned traceability and Customer Service owned chargebacks, and the two teams were about to build the same shipping record twice, independently
• A club retailer had begun deducting cash for late deliveries, with no gate record to settle whether a truck arrived at 6 a.m. or 2 a.m.

We rebuilt the record of what went into every batch, sequenced so the traceability gap closed before anything else was touched, and left the plant's larger ERP questions alone rather than making them a precondition.

Blend station traceability

A tablet at the blend station: operators scan each ingredient lot into the kettle, and the batch record closes automatically when the blend closes, replacing the paper ticket keyed in days later.

Rework and add-back identity

Add-back now carries the lot it came from and is scanned into the batch it enters, or the lot is held until it can be. The trail that used to break at rework now holds.

Shipment and dock capture

Lot, quantity, destination, carrier, appointment window, and gate times are captured once at the dock, replacing two teams independently reconstructing the same shipment after the fact.

One record, two jobs

The fields that satisfy the federal traceability rule are the fields that win a chargeback dispute, so Quality and Customer Service stopped maintaining separate versions of the truth.

A layer beside the existing platform

The traceability record was built alongside Dynamics NAV and SPS Commerce rather than forcing a bigger replatforming decision first, so the plant got traceable in weeks instead of waiting years for a system decision to resolve itself.

Recall simulation and dispute reporting

Recall boundaries can be simulated on demand instead of assembled by hand over three days, and deduction disputes go out with gate and dock timestamps attached.