Food distributor ERP: FEFO expiry control and cold-chain traceability

Every product had a shelf life. Most had strict cold-chain documentation requirements from their supplier contracts. Several were subject to food safety regulations requiring traceability from supplier batch to end customer delivery.

Expiry dates were recorded on paper lot cards when goods arrived in the warehouse. Picking was done by warehouse staff based on physical proximity to the picking area, not by expiry date. FEFO (First Expiry, First Out) was a policy on paper but not enforced in any system. No one knew which batches were approaching expiry until a physical count was done at month-end.

Near-expiry goods were regularly discovered during monthly counts too late to redistribute or discount effectively. Between 4 and 6 pallets were written off every month. In one quarter, a supplier issued a recall and the team spent three days manually tracing which customers had received the affected batch.

Food safety audits required the compliance team to manually compile chain-of-custody documentation from paper lot cards, delivery notes, and supplier certificates. A single audit preparation took two full working days. The business was growing its institutional food service accounts, which had stricter traceability requirements than existing customers. The current system could not scale to meet them.

• FEFO not enforced at the system level pickers chose stock by proximity rather than expiry date, consistently shipping newer goods first and leaving older stock to expire
• No near-expiry alerts approaching expiry dates were invisible until the monthly physical count, by which point clearance was often impossible
• Lot traceability existed only on paper, requiring 3-day manual cross-referencing to respond to a supplier recall or customer complaint
• No supplier lot documentation linked to outbound deliveries, so chain-of-custody for institutional clients had to be reconstructed manually
• Chilled and frozen stock handled the same way as ambient no temperature zone separation in the stock records or picking logic

• Batch & Expiry Management (FEFO). System-enforced FEFO picking across all product categories, with automatic near-expiry alerts at 30, 14, and 7 days before expiry
• Lot Traceability End-to-End. Full supplier lot linked to every customer delivery — one-click traceability report from receipt to dispatch, covering every movement in between
• Stock & Warehouse Management. Temperature zone separation (ambient, chilled, frozen) with zone-specific putaway rules and picking sequences built into the warehouse layout
• Purchase & Supplier Management. Supplier certificates and lot documentation captured at goods receipt, linked to batch records and available for audit in one click
• Quality & Compliance Reporting. Food safety audit reports generated directly from ERPNext in under 30 minutes, replacing two days of manual document preparation

1. Full Physical Count & Batch Data Capture (Weeks 1–2). A full physical count was conducted across all stock, capturing lot numbers and expiry dates for every item in the warehouse. This created the clean opening batch data that FEFO enforcement depended on.
2. ERPNext Configuration & Warehouse Zoning (Weeks 3–6). Warehouse zones were configured in ERPNext for ambient, chilled, and frozen categories. FEFO picking rules, near-expiry alert thresholds, and supplier lot capture templates were set up and validated with the warehouse manager.
3. Warehouse Team Training & FEFO Drill (Weeks 7–8). All warehouse staff trained on FEFO picking procedures, lot receipt entry, and the near-expiry alert dashboard. A two-day live-order drill confirmed the team could execute FEFO correctly under real picking pressure before go-live.
4. Full Go-live & Hyper-care (Weeks 9–10). ERPNext went live as the sole system of record. Paper lot cards were retired. All new receipts entered the FEFO queue automatically. A 30-day hyper-care period followed, with daily check-ins for the first two weeks to catch any edge cases in the FEFO logic.