Run the drill
Pick a finished lot shipped last month and ask four questions. Which raw material lots went into it? Which machine made it? Who ran it? What were the test results? Start a timer.
Read the result
If the answer takes days, the data probably exists but lives in five places: the ERP, a quality spreadsheet, a paper traveler, the weighbridge system and someone's memory. Each handover between them is a place for a gap.
If the answer takes seconds, your records were linked at the moment of production. That is the only time linking is cheap, because the material, machine and operator are all in front of you.
Then go the other way
A backward trace starts with a finished lot. A forward trace starts with a suspect ingredient lot and asks where it went. The forward trace decides how much product you have to hold or recall, so it is the one that saves money.
Run both once a quarter. The drill finds gaps before a customer or a regulator does.
In short
- Time a full trace on a real shipped lot.
- Slow traces mean records are linked after the fact.
- Test forward traces as well as backward ones.