FreshFocus Produce Properties

Overview

Produce properties are the cornerstone of food traceability. Food supply chain companies need to record a range of industry-specific attributes against individual items to ensure compliance and labelling requirements are met. These attributes need to capture broad information about the commodity, the producer, where the produce was processed, and where the produce is to be sold.

FreshFocus Core adds three types of produce properties, Commodity, Producers and Marketing. More types can be added by your VAR.

Commodity properties describe what the item is, and normally require crop, grade, size, variety properties to be defined.
Producer properties describe where the produce originates from, and typically records produce, block, and site information.
Marketing properties describe who the item is for and typically involve retail marks, packaging types and describes a brand, or retailer.

Properties are defined on items, and represented in inventory via Lots. To overcome the limitations of many systems requiring a discrete item for each combination of properties, FreshFocus has deliberately made this flexible to accommodate the many ways in which producers need to define and trace their items.

The diagram below shows how the commodity specifications are organised as a hierarchy within FreshFocus.

For example, this allows you to grade out to the same item that you input with different properties. FreshFocus handles all the traceability using Business Central's highly capable tracking and reservations engine.

When produce is downgraded, instead of having to define an item, and create orders to process the inventory, you can simply reclassify the properties of specific lots, FreshFocus keeps a complete audit trail of these changes.

This feature saves time, and keeps your master records simples and clean. The flexibility means FreshFocus is able to be used in a very wide range of scenarios unique to each business.

The first step in configuring FreshFocus is to setup the produce properties. Once completed, they can be attached to items along with criteria that controls how FreshFocus requires or inherits these properties.