About LOT AXIS
Twenty-six years on the plant floor
I have spent most of my working life inside food plants.
Seafood houses in Alaska and Washington. Meat and poultry operations. Produce packers running fresh product against a clock that never stops. Twenty-six years of it, installing barcode, traceability, inventory and production systems that people had to be able to use at five in the morning with cold hands and a line already moving.
That is where LOT AXIS came from. Not from a whiteboard.
The problem I kept walking into
Every plant I visited and customer I spoke with had already bought software. Usually several.
There was a labeling system. There was an inventory system, or a set of spreadsheets doing the job of one. There was something for traceability, often built because a customer audit demanded it. Each one worked. None of them talked to the others.
So the person holding everything together was a human being — a production supervisor with a clipboard, a plant manager who knew where the real numbers were, an office manager who could reconcile three screens in her head and was the only one who could. That knowledge was not in a system. It was in her.
Then the questions would come. What is our yield on this run? Which lots went to that customer? How much of this raw material is still on the floor? And the answer was always the same: give us a few hours.
The data existed. It had been captured, honestly and carefully, at every station. It just was not connected to anything.
What we do about it
LOT AXIS structures production data at the moment it is created, rather than reassembling it afterwards.
When a box is labeled, a pallet is built, an order is loaded or a count is taken, that event lands in one place with its lot, its quantity, its location and its time already attached. Nothing has to be matched up later. There is nothing to reconcile.
That is what we mean by Lot Intelligence™. It is not a feature. It is the decision to make the plant floor the system of record instead of the place where the paperwork starts.
What that unlocks is rarely what people expect when they start looking. One of our seafood customers had been shipping everything out of its Alaska plants to a Seattle cold-storage facility first, because Seattle was the only place the paperwork could be trusted. Once the lots were tracked properly at the plant, they could ship direct from Alaska and take the better freight rate. Nobody had bought the software to fix their transportation costs.
The practical difference:
Question | Before | With LOT AXIS |
Where did this lot go? | Hours across three systems and a binder | A trace, forwards or backwards, on one screen |
What is our yield on this run? | Next week, from a spreadsheet | While the run is still going |
What is actually in the cooler? | A count, then an argument about the count | Lot-level, live, by location |
Can we handle a recall? | A fire drill nobody wants to rehearse | A list of affected lots and who has them |
Who we are good for
We are a good fit if you are a seafood, meat, poultry or produce processor who has outgrown spreadsheets and clipboards, and who is now being asked by retailers and by FSMA 204 to prove things you can currently only estimate.
We are honest about the other side of that. If you want a full ERP to run your accounting and your HR, we are not that, and the companies that sell it will happily tell you so. If a shared spreadsheet genuinely covers your lot tracking today, you do not need us yet. Call us when a customer asks a question you cannot answer in an afternoon.
What working with us is actually like
You will deal with people who have been in a plant like yours.
We do not hand you a login and wish you luck. We install, we configure it to how your facility actually runs, and we train the people who will use it — including the ones who would rather not be trained on anything. Our handheld software is written on the assumption that the person holding the scanner is wearing gloves, is in a hurry, and did not ask for new software.
We are based in Seattle. When you call, you get someone who knows the product and, more often than not, has stood on a floor like yours.
Where the name comes from
Every product you make has a lot. That lot is the axis everything else turns on — the yield, the trace, the count, the recall, the customer’s audit. Get the lot right at the moment it is created and everything downstream gets easier.
That is the whole idea. It took twenty-six years to make it simple.
In their words
SIMBA has been a great tool for our company. It solved three huge problems: production tracking, traceability and shipping accuracy. — Icy Strait Seafoods |
Before we implemented SIMBA, the products were shipped to our Seattle headquarters for cold storage. With SIMBA, we’re able to ship directly out of our Alaska plants, giving us better transportation rates. Without this technology it would be impossible to track such a high number of varied shipments from vessel to destination. — Tom Marshall, General Manager, Ocean Beauty Seafoods |
The system makes it easy to track, organize, and re-box as needed, keeping great records on several orders at once. — Sara Osborne, Peters Cranberries |
I like the simplicity of the SIMBA touchscreen for the plant workers. SIMBA Office is very user friendly as well. — Controller, Icy Strait Seafoods |
I never realized full traceability could be so easy! — Rusty McLain, owner, McLain Farms |
Customer service is fantastic. I can’t imagine doing this without the SIMBA system. — Devon Lynn, Valley Oaks Steak Company |
SIMBA is now LOT AXIS. These customers know the system by its original name.