Frozen Food ERP Software for Manufacturers

FEFO (short for First Expired, First Out) is a method of inventory stock rotation which prioritizes picking and shipping finished products or using material in production that have the earliest expiration dates, regardless of when they were received into inventory. 

Even though frozen food products tend to have a longer shelf life due to the process of how goods are manufactured and stored, FEFO is still important for them to use, as the shelf life is ultimately finite, and retailers require products to arrive with a minimum percentage of their total shelf life remaining. 

ERP for frozen food companies allows companies to manage their inventory using the FEFO method by scanning the batch lot number, manufacturing date, and expiration date when raw materials arrive. With this information saved, frozen food ERP will be able to tell you at what location these raw materials are stored and which batches are close to approaching their expiry date.

Frozen food ERP like Digit helps you manage your expiry dates and shelf life with serialized inventory that comes with custom fields so you can track the exact information you need to avoid inventory spoiling. 

When you use Digit, you can open the software and start creating products. To enable full end-to-end traceability for your items, you will need to set up serialized quantity tracking. What this does is assign unique IDs to your inventory and batches, giving you a traceable record of your serialized goods. 

As for the custom fields we mentioned, you can track any information you want with them. 

But, for a frozen food item, you may want to add custom fields for monitoring: 

• Best-before date
• Batch date
• Any other date-based data point your operation requires

You can also easily set reorder points with Digit — so when inventory levels are falling to a point where production or sales might become disrupted, Digit will send you a notification.

Lot traceability is the ability to track batches of finished goods or raw materials throughout your entire supply chain. 

How this works in ERP for frozen food companies is that when a batch is received or created, a lot number is assigned to that batch. This number is how you’ll be able to identify products from a batch as it moves through the different stages of your operations (and beyond). Lot traceability gives you a complete history of your items, telling you: 

• The origins of your materials 
• How they were processed 
• Where they ended up

For example, take Digit. 

In Digit, lot numbers are assigned directly to manufacturing orders. When a manufacturing order is created, you have the opportunity to add the lot number, and it automatically carries through to every work order and output label generated from that production run. When a production run is finished, and your finished goods inventory increases, a label is generated and can be printed and placed on that batch, tying the physical goods to the serialized inventory record in the system. For frozen food manufacturers, this level of traceability is essential for quality control, compliance, and the ability to isolate and respond to affected batches quickly if a recall or quality issue arises.