What's your poison?
15 Jan 2000
Today, Britain's meat, poultry and dairy manufacturers have many tough demands placed on them and they have to maintain a difficult balancing act, writes Mike Spear. At the same time that the big-name supermarkets are placing ever-more stringent demands on their suppliers to meet improved standards, those same supermarkets want the manufacturers to be more flexible, increase productivity and up their output.
It is now critical that suppliers can track each product back to its source and trace any infections, defects or problems that may occur in a product. It is also critical that the manufacturer can do this without affecting production. Tracing products in this way enables suppliers to give accurate information to retailers while maintaining maximum productivity.
One company that provides such tracking systems is Pantek. Based on the technology of Wonderware's InTrack package - itself a component of Wonderware's FactorySuite 2000 set of Windows NT-based modules for factory automation - these systems can be tailor-made to specific applications. InTrack is a set of graphical application development tools for building client/server applications to monitor, manage and improve production.
