Slovacek Sausage, Snook, TX, specializes in the manufacture of upmarket sausage & bacon products to many of the major US retailers. This report is about how Slovacek has used the ‘Vantage’ Inventory, Formula Control and Finished Product Tracking Solution to go above and beyond the FDA Traceability requirement.

Pretty much everybody around Snook knew old Uncle John Slovacek. He was a friendly guy who just happened to make the best sausage anyone had ever tasted. Finally, in 1957, Uncle John did what all his friends had been urging him to do. He dropped his amateur status and turned professional sausage maker. And the world is a better place for it. The company is now owned by Tim Rabroker, who has turned the company into an efficient ‘zero mistake culture’ manufacturing facility with the tightest possible ingredient control and traceability available. “We’re using it as a tool to show our distributors to the retail market what we can do” Rabroker said.

The fact that all sausages are prepared by hand and require a number of different ingredients can pose difficulties in keeping track of individual amounts used and that correct quantities are added to ensure a consistent product. SG Systems has extensive knowledge and experience in the area of formula control and inventory management (raw ingredient and finished product).

Slovacek is a customer who has seen the ingredient savings by installing the system; “We’ve found that it made us become a better company. We’re more streamlined in how we do things and know if any waste is occurring; previously we weren’t keeping those numbers. Now that we can record those figures, our guys are more aware of what they are doing. With the waste now eliminated, dollars are saved.” Rabroker said.

The system installed at Slovacek provides traceability from receiving ingredients through to the dispatch of labeled finished inventory. Along the process are 5 ‘Vantage’ Touch Screen Terminals connected to weighing platforms and label printers which enable the manufacturing plan to be communicated with the production team. The system has virtually eliminated time consuming paper based production and traceability records.

The formula for particular products is entered into the PC Server via the recipe formulation management software. The system allows management to enter and determine the exact recipe characteristics, including individual ingredient tolerances and how the products are added. For instance, recipes may be a mixture of weighed spices and bulky meat based ingredients – both of which are weighed to tight tolerances (enforced by the system) to produce a consistent taste and texture to the sausage.

The system calculates the amounts of individual ingredients needed and downloads the order to the relevant station, providing an effortless formulation process, with the large screen prompting the operator throughout as each correct amount of ingredient is added. The system will not allow the operator to continue if the incorrect ingredient is selected or the wrong amount added. Detailed instructions relating to product characteristics are also flagged up to ensure adequate HACCP requirements are met.

Once the final product has been cooked and packaged, the finished boxed product is weighed and labeled to ensure weight tolerances are adhered to. Once the label has been applied, the finished product inventory system is then updated to provide real time visibility of exactly how many boxes have been produced.

The final piece of software is a customer sales order processing system. This software enables customer specific orders to be entered into the system and then the orders are sent to the dispatch terminal for the operator to ‘allocate’ the inventory.

The end result is a system which can trace an ingredient through the manufacturing process to a finished product. In the event of an ingredient recall, we can provide our customers with the assurance that we have 100% visibility of which ingredient has been used, how much and when.

SG Systems’ General Manager, comments “SG is a company that prides itself on thinking outside of the box to deliver solutions to eliminate paperwork and provide customers with a return on investment. The team at Slovacek is forward thinking, innovative and appreciate that traceability can be turned from being a USDA headache into something which can be used to deliver real business value. Above all though, they make a knock-out sausage and we always enjoy our visits to their factory!”