Rebuilding a traceability file takes you half a day

Material certificates, heat or batch numbers, inspection records, delivery notes: the evidence exists, but it is scattered across five different places.

Thirty minutes, no commitment

Describe your flow. I'll tell you what can be automated and where I would start.

Your quality system works. You are certified, you pass your audits, your customers get their parts. The problem is not compliance: it is the cost of the evidence. Every time something has to be demonstrated, somebody spends hours gathering documents that already existed.

Traceability is not a document. It is a link: between an order, a works order, a material batch, an operator, a measuring device and a delivery. When that link is written down nowhere, it has to be rebuilt by hand on every request.

What it looks like in your shop

The material certificate is a PDF in a mailbox

The supplier emails the certificate of conformity. It gets saved in a folder, sometimes renamed, sometimes not. The link between that certificate and the parts actually made from the material exists only in the storekeeper's head and on a label stuck to the bar.

The batch number is written on the bin in marker pen

It then gets copied onto the traveller, then sometimes into the ERP, sometimes not. Every copy is a chance to lose it. The day a customer reports a defect on parts delivered six months ago, the question is simple: which other parts are affected? Without a digital link, the answer is « widen the scope to be safe », and that is the recall that costs real money.

The paper traveller rides with the batch, and sometimes goes missing

It picks up grease, annotations accumulate, a box goes unfilled because the operator at the next station took over in a hurry. It is archived at the end of the job, in a binder, and becomes effectively unfindable within months.

Audit preparation becomes a project in its own right

Six weeks out, the quality manager stops everything else. Management reviews, training records, gauge history sheets, overdue calibrations, open corrective actions. That is not quality work, it is document retrieval.

Calibrations are tracked in a file with dates highlighted in red

The file is up to date as long as the person maintaining it is there. A caliper used out of calibration for an incoming inspection is a major finding, and it almost always comes from a reminder nobody saw.

What it actually costs

The cost of manual traceability is lopsided: very low day to day, very high at the two moments you cannot afford to pay it — the customer complaint and the audit.

Rebuilding one traceability file: 2 hours to half a dayMultiply by the number of customer requests and customer audits you receive per year. In subcontracting for demanding OEMs, that is far from marginal.
Preparing the certification audit: 3 to 10 person-days per yearFor a part-time quality manager — common between 20 and 100 employees — that is several weeks of their other work displaced.
Scope widening during an incident: from 1 batch to 3 months of outputWithout a reliable link between material batch and delivered parts, you recall wide. The extra cost of a single incident of this kind often exceeds the budget of a complete automation project.
Audit findings tied to records: most minor findings raisedRarely about the process itself, almost always about the evidence: unverified corrective action, overdue calibration, record that cannot be found.

Put differently: you do not pay for traceability every day. You pay for it all at once, at the worst possible moment, and the amount is not up to you.

How it gets fixed

This is not about adding data entry to please an auditor. It is about capturing the link at the moment it naturally forms, and making it queryable afterwards.

1. We find the points where the link breaks
Goods receipt, works order release, shift handover, subcontracting, dispatch. At each point, one question: does the link between the physical object and its digital identifier survive? Usually two or three of them are enough to break the whole chain, and those are the only ones worth fixing.
2. The batch number becomes a scanned code, not retyped text
Label at goods receipt, scan at release, scan at dispatch. Three one-second actions replacing three manual transcriptions. It is unspectacular and it changes everything: from then on, « which parts used this material batch? » is a query, not an investigation.
3. Documents attach themselves
The material certificate arriving by email is filed against the batch, not into a network folder. The inspection record is linked to the works order. The delivery note is linked to the batches shipped. The traceability file stops being a document you build: it becomes a view you print.
4. Due dates chase you instead of waiting for you
Calibrations, corrective actions, reviews, qualifications: reminders go out on their own, with a named owner. The point is not to monitor people, it is to stop compliance depending on one person's memory.

On audit day you show a screen rather than a binder, and you answer a customer recall question in minutes.

What this does not fix

What this does not fix:

It does not certify you. I am not a certification body and I do not write your quality manual. I deal with the mechanics of the evidence.
It does not replace your quality manager, and if you have none at all, the tool will not create the system in their place.
If your process is not stable, digitising it simply freezes the disorder. A process whose rules change every fortnight should be settled before it is tooled.
Heavy sector requirements — medical devices, aerospace, regulated food production — bring validation constraints I do not take on alone. I tell you that at the audit rather than after signature.
Existing paper archives stay paper. We start from now, not from 2011.

The questions I get asked

What does it cost?

The two-day audit is €1,500. A traceability project lands between €10,000 and €15,000 fixed price depending on the number of capture points and the scanning hardware needed. Hardware (scanners, label printers) is quoted separately and bought by you directly, with no margin on my side.

How long before it runs?

Three to four weeks on one flow — typically goods receipt to dispatch, on one product family. Other flows follow afterwards, faster, because the foundation is in place.

Do we need to change ERP?

No. Many SME ERPs already handle batches but the function was never commissioned, often because the manual entry it required was unrealistic. Scanning makes that function usable. When that is the case, we switch on what exists rather than rebuild — which is cheaper for you.

Will this make more work for operators?

If the answer is yes, the project has failed. The rule I hold myself to: an action added must remove at least one. A scan replaces a transcription, it is not added on top. If a station ends up with more handling than before, we redesign.

What if our auditor does not accept digital records?

Digital records are accepted provided they are identifiable, legible, protected against untracked modification and retrievable. That is exactly what gets put in place: timestamp, author, revision history. If your certification body has a specific requirement, we read it together before designing.

What if you're no longer around?

The code and documentation are yours and everything runs on your infrastructure. On a subject touching compliance that is non-negotiable, and it is written into the quotation.

Can we start small?

It is the only sensible way. One customer, one part family, one flow. If the gain isn't visible on that scope, it won't be visible company-wide either, and it is better to find that out over three weeks than over a year.

In your trade

This job is not equally urgent everywhere. These pages say where it sits in the running order, trade by trade.

Let's talk for thirty minutes

You describe your flow, I tell you what can be automated, what cannot, and where I would start. If I'm not the right person, I'll say so during the call.