Traceability
Also called Track and trace, One-up one-down
Being able to follow any unit backwards to its ingredients and forwards to its customers, quickly and on demand.
The regulatory baseline in most markets is “one up, one down”: you must know who supplied everything that came in, and who received everything that went out. That alone is not enough to run a recall efficiently, because it does not connect the two.
A working trace connects them through the batch. An ingredient lot goes into a specific batch, that batch becomes a specific set of finished units with a lot code, and those units ship to specific customers. Any point in that chain can then be queried in either direction.
The test is time. Auditors typically ask you to demonstrate a full trace within a few hours, using a randomly chosen lot. Sites that pass are the ones that captured the links as the work happened.
NextBatch keeps this straight for you. Cost per unit, tolling tiers, yield and traceability all derive from the same plan you and your co-manufacturer share — so none of it is a number somebody typed twice.
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