Ampla Tracking enables you to trace all aspects of your production system by batch, date of manufacture, product type, supplier, or packing information. It enables business managers to reduce the scope of product recalls, increase consumer confidence and comply with increasingly strict regulatory requirements.

By combining Ampla Tracking with Ampla Quality, managers can trace the genealogy of product quality right back to raw material suppliers and individual deliveries, allowing them to better manage suppliers and their conformance to quality requirements.



Tracking Analysis
Ampla Tracking logs genealogy information from the production process by dividing the process into ‘Lots’. Typically a ‘lot’ is used to define the largest process activity that contains no material addition or subtraction, and hence requires no genealogy details. Wherever material is added or subtracted from the production process a new ‘lot’ is created to track those details. Information that is inherent within the module includes parent/child genealogy, date/time stamps and Lot IDs. Additional information can be added to the system for specific deployments, including the volume and material type being tracked, as well as other related information such as Crew, Product ID, Batch ID and so on. The Tracking module supports multi-parent and multi-client genealogy for total flexibility of reporting.

The Tracking client is delivered via the web and provides powerful genealogy tracing facilities such as Trace-Up, Trace-Down and Trace-Till, allowing simple tracing of complex genealogies. For example, if a product problem is reported and the batch is identified, the Tracking client can trace from the resultant batch all the way back through the production process to the supplier deliveries in only a few mouse clicks. It can then trace back down the production process to clearly identify all batches related to those suppliers, input materials and specific deliveries again in only a few mouse clicks. This vastly reduces the overheads in product recalls. For example, a tire manufacturer recall in the USA forced the company to recall two years worth of production because they could not clearly identify the production runs that the problematic tires had come from. With a suitable tracking solution it is likely that their recall could have been limited to a much smaller volume, both reducing costs and increasing customer confidence.

Navigation is achieved via an explorer tree that typically mimics the physical hierarchy of the plant. Data is ‘rolled up’ the hierarchy, so that higher levels aggregate the data stored in lower branches of the tree, making summary reporting a breeze. Crystal Reports is integrated into the client so that customized reports can be published remotely to the web browser, with full interactive capabilities to the navigation tree and filter options. This delivers a powerful method of quality analysis, with strong customization capabilities inside an easy-to-use interface.

Maximizing productivity
In addition to tracking product genealogy, the Tracking module can be used in conjunction with other modules such as Ampla Production and Quality to provide comprehensive process diagnostics information on items such as supplier quality and quantities which can then be used for purposes such as billing, inventory and payments, as well as supplier negotiations if quality variations are significant. The tight integration of the Ampla suite of modules is key to getting the most from your existing plant infrastructure.