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Lot Management

Lot management refers to the process of organizing, tracking, and controlling batches of products or materials, known as 'lots' throughout their lifecycle in manufacturing, supply chain, or inventory management systems. A 'lot' typically represents a specific quantity of items produced or received at the same time, sharing the same production or manufacturing characteristics, such as batch number, expiration date, or production date.

Key aspects of lot management include:

  • Lot Identification: Each lot is assigned a unique identifier or code, which is used to track the lot through the entire supply chain, from production to sale or distribution.
  • Traceability: Lot management enables full traceability, meaning that at any point, it's possible to trace back a product to its source, including raw materials, production processes, and distribution channels. This is crucial for quality control, regulatory compliance, and responding to recalls or defects.
  • Inventory Control: By managing lots, businesses can optimize inventory levels, ensuring that older lots are used or sold before newer ones (e.g., first-in-first-out (FIFO) inventory management), which is particularly important for perishable goods.
  • Quality Assurance: Lot management helps in maintaining product quality by tracking specific lots, allowing for the identification of potential issues within a specific batch, and taking corrective actions if necessary.
  • Compliance: In industries such as pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, and chemicals, lot management is essential for meeting regulatory requirements, as it provides the necessary documentation and records to demonstrate compliance.
  • Recall Management: In case of product defects or safety concerns, lot management allows for targeted recalls, limiting the recall to specific affected lots rather than a wider range of products, reducing costs and minimizing damage to the brand.

Overall, effective lot management enhances operational efficiency, ensures product quality, and helps companies meet regulatory standards, while also providing the necessary tools for quick and precise action in response to issues like recalls or quality defects.

Managing Lots in Kanoa OPS​

Lot Management in Kanoa OPS consists of a lot schema, lot functions and a pre-built user interface (views and components).

In essence, there are several objects...

  • Lot Operation - This is any operation that touches a lot such as receiving, transferring, splitting etc. We provide some basic operations out of the box, but you can create whatever operations you need.
  • Lot - This is the Lot itself. It describes the material and units for this lot.
  • Lot Event - The lot event is the input to or output from a lot operation. It contains the quantity in or out, the lot state, and where it came from or went to.

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Lot Operations​

We provide the following operations for you...

  1. Process - Consumes input lots and creates or adds to output lots
  2. Receive - Creates or adds to output lots only
  3. Scrap - Consumes from input lots only
  4. Split - Consumes from input lot and creates or adds to output lots
  5. Transfer - Consumes from input lots and creates or adds to output lots

Lot Operations and Lot States are configurable. See Lot Configuration for more details.

Executing Lot Operations​

The Lot Manager screen shows the location and state of all Lots. Lot Operations can be executed from this screen, however it is intended more to show how lot operations can be executed and it is expected that custom operator screens would be created using this screen as an example.

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Lot Traceability​

The Kanoa Node Chart component provides a way to visually trace all the operations, lots and events associated with a lot.

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