Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Lot Tracking and Shade Matching

One of the challenges faced by ceramic tile and other building products distributors is ensuring each product type supplied has exactly the same colour shade.

Why is this important? Imagine walking into a large hotel foyer and noticing a difference in the shade of floor tiles from one side of the room to the other.

Even though Quality Controls ("QC") processes ensure consistency within and across multiple production runs, there will often be very small variations in the colour dyes used and overall shade due to the variability of clay, sand and other natural components. The QC process ensures products are graded and packaged into similar shades and identified with a batch number for tracking purposes.

To ensure customer orders are supplied with product manufactured from the one production batch (and shade), distributors adopt either manual warehousing records or an accounting system that handles multiple lots/batches across each product.

Some more powerful accounting systems even identify the actual bin location or aisle and level on the pick list to speed the warehouse pick and pack process.

More information: Axsapt

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