Aldata’s focus on traceability

The food safety act signed into law earlier this year puts new compliance regulations onto food and beverage manufacturers.

“Today, an inspector can come into your facility with little warning and in 24 hours, you have to be able to produce the data about your products that they are looking for,” said Mark Engemann, national accounts manager, North America, for Aldata Solution (Booth 3081) at a booth visit Wednesday. “In order to do that, you need to be able to capture every touch in a facility along with the lot, batch and weight information needed for full product traceability.”

Aldata, has developed a multi-modal voice recognition and bar code scanning solution “to cover the mandates,” says Engemann. The solution allows a warehouse worker to seamlessly choose between bar code scanning to capture lot or catch weight information and a voice mode to confirm pick locations, items and quantities picked, all without toggling between applications. “Every time you touch a product, we’re not only going to capture that information, we’ll time and date stamp the event from the time product hits the DC door until it leaves,” he told Modern.

In addition to multi-modal data capture solutions, Aldata has a full suite of supply chain execution, planning and retail point-of-sale solutions for grocery and retail businesses. The company’s vision is to integrate those systems with the multi-modal data capture solution to provide real-time traceability from the DC to the store shelf to the check out counter. “We are not there yet, but that is the solution we are developing,” Engemann says.

ProMat 2011 will be held March 21 - 24, 2011 at McCormick Place South in Chicago. The tradeshow will showcase the latest manufacturing, distribution and supply chain solutions in the material handling and logistics industry.

Read all of Modern’s ProMat 2011 coverage