Quality & Lot Traceability in the Food Industry

A unified approach to secure, control, and enhance product information

Context and Challenges

The food industry is a sector where safety, transparency, and rigor are non‑negotiable. Foundational texts—such as Regulation (EC) No. 178/2002 or the ISO 22000 standard—remind us of a simple reality: every company must be able to identify where its products come from, how they were processed, and to whom they were delivered. Regulators, but also distributors and consumers, expect fast, reliable, and verifiable answers—especially during a recall or an audit.

This pressure is no longer just a regulatory obligation: it now shapes the competitive landscape of the industry.

Mastering Product Information: A Governance Imperative

Traceability no longer means simply “finding a lot number.” Today, it refers to the ability to reconstruct the complete history of a product: its origins, controls, processing steps, and quality decisions. It is a management tool that supports teams, secures flows, and enables rapid answers to customer or regulatory inquiries.

To achieve this, information must be consistent, reliable, and easy to access.

The Central Role of the Quality Function

Quality teams are on the front lines to guarantee product compliance. They receive, analyze, release or block lots, manage non‑conformities, and prepare audits. Their efficiency is directly tied to the quality of the information system: it must be complete, clear, versioned, and shared across the organization.

When these conditions are met, the Quality function becomes a real driver of performance. For maximum effectiveness, quality should not operate in a silo—it must be integrated into every flow: purchasing, production, storage, preparation, and shipping.

When traceability, controls, and customer requirements are brought together within a unified framework, teams gain in clarity, speed, and consistency.

With Bricklead applications, the Quality function can rely on four essential pillars:

• Lot inspection statuses
• Lot attributes
• Specifications
• Lot handling and history tracking

Inspection Statuses: Securing Decisions and Operations

The inspection status is one of the most important tools for preventing misuse and ensuring that the right products are used at the right time. It addresses a very concrete need: preventing an unchecked or non‑compliant lot from entering a production process or being shipped. In multi‑site or fast‑paced organizations, it is an essential safeguard.

Statuses also align teams around a shared level of information: Blocked, Pending, Released, or Rejected. These visible, standardized states reduce misunderstandings between departments and streamline execution.

From a regulatory standpoint, they ensure that every quality decision is recorded, justified, and traceable—greatly simplifying audits.

The Bricklead Inspection Status solution strengthens this logic by automating status assignment, enforcing blocking rules across workflows, and logging every change. The result: increased safety, fewer risks, and smoother cross‑team coordination.

Structuring, Securing, and Transmitting Lot‑Specific Data

In the daily work of quality and supply chain teams, recording lot‑specific characteristics can become a real challenge. Information associated with a lot—test results, physicochemical values, organoleptic parameters, certifications, allergens, origin data, environmental conditions, and more—is often scattered, manually recorded, or stored in documents disconnected from the information system.

This fragmentation complicates inspections, slows decision‑making, and increases the risk of errors or non‑compliance.

An additional requirement is ensuring that critical lot attributes are correctly passed on during production processes. When lots are consumed to manufacture others, companies must guarantee that critical information—such as allergens, nutritional values, analysis results, stability parameters, or origin properties—is automatically carried over to the finished product, without manual re‑entry or information loss.

This inheritance mechanism is essential to ensure regulatory compliance, document quality control, and maintain end‑to‑end traceability.

Advanced Attributes Management addresses these challenges head‑on. The solution enables the recording, structuring, and centralization of all lot‑specific values using typed attributes (text, date, option, integer…). It also ensures the automatic inheritance of attributes throughout production processes, eliminating manual entries and securing the transmission of critical information.

By making data accessible, reliable, and embedded within operational flows, Advanced Attributes Management strengthens the quality system, reduces compliance risks, and dramatically simplifies audit preparation.

Specifications and Customer Requirements: A Key Industry Need

Manufacturers face two categories of obligations today: regulatory requirements and customer requirements—which are often even more stringent. Shelf‑life rules, FEFO, specific tests, origin requirements, sensory criteria, environmental standards… Specifications determine access to strategic markets.

Managing these requirements through standalone documents or uncontrolled files is a real risk. To remain competitive and avoid non‑compliance, companies need a tool that can centralize, structure, and update requirements—while automatically applying them across internal processes.

This is precisely the purpose of Quality Requirements & Specifications (QRS). The solution formalizes specifications, integrates them directly into business workflows, and ensures that each lot truly meets the commitments made to customers or authorities.

QRS reinforces transparency, secures execution, and simplifies audit preparation.

Lot Handling, History Tracking, and Audits: An Operational Prerequisite

Companies must routinely manage lot splits, merges, information corrections, or adjustments linked to production. For reliable traceability, every action must be documented, timestamped, attributed, and retrievable. Without this, reconstructing a product’s path—or meeting a demanding audit—becomes difficult.

Advanced Lot Management (ALM) provides the transparency and rigor teams need. The application automatically records every action performed on a lot, reconstructs its full lifecycle, and delivers a clear, usable audit trail. ALM also simplifies sensitive operations—like splits and merges—and ensures that data remains consistent regardless of site or user.

This visibility strengthens the company’s ability to demonstrate control, improves responsiveness, and reduces the risk of discrepancies between internal practices and regulatory or customer expectations.

The Bricklead + Business Central Ecosystem: A Unified Architecture

Combining Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with Bricklead solutions creates a coherent and comprehensive ecosystem:

• Inspection Status (INS) secures quality decisions
• Advanced Attributes Management (AAT) structures analytical data
• Quality Requirements & Specifications (QRS) manages specifications
• Advanced Lot Management (ALM) ensures transparency and traceability

Together, these components provide a robust foundation for modernizing quality oversight and securing traceability.

Conclusion

In a sector where food safety and compliance are strategic, having a unified information system is no longer an advantage—it is a necessity. By integrating inspection statuses, customer requirements, advanced lot handling, and reliable traceability, manufacturers can operate with greater confidence, consistency, and agility.

Bricklead solutions, fully integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, offer a modern, robust, and scalable framework to support this transformation.