Ever wanted to track the expiry dates of your products so that you may be able to sell every item that arrived in a batch? 

Ever wanted to curb the instances of selling defective units to your customers? 

Well, your wait is over! 

We have something that would help you do all these things and more. 

Zoho Inventory is happy to announce the release of its much-awaited feature, Batch Tracking!

What is Batch Tracking? 

The term Batch Tracking, in its primal form means, to track a group of items with similar properties. But when we talk about its definition in a real-life situation, batch tracking means the ability to track a batch of products right from the creation to its sale. 

What sort of industries are at an advantage? 

Batch production is most common in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry, in the manufacture of sports shoes, pharmaceutical ingredients, purifying water, inks, paints, adhesives and more. 

If you use Batch Tracking, here's what you get to do. 

This feature enables the manufacturers and other entities to :  

1) Perform quality control checks.  

2) Calculate expiration dates. 

3) Issue corrections or recall information to subsets of their production output. 

It also allows consumers to distinguish different units of the same product from a manufacturer, spot defects or learn why certain batches are different from the rest.

Let's take the example of a leading car manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki. This company recalled 20,427 units of the Suzuki S- Cross back in 2016 due to a faulty brake part that resulted in the seepage of brake fluid. Interestingly, all of these cars were found to be manufactured within a specific period of 11 months.

Now how in the world did Maruti Suzuki know that the vehicles manufactured in that specific time frame were the ones at fault? 

This is where Batch Tracking comes into play. 

Every single unit that was recalled by them had been fitted with faulty brakes from the same batch. Now, when customers came and complained about the seepage of the brake fluid, Maruti Suzuki used the batch tracking system to inspect a few vehicles in that time frame and came to the conclusion that it was a faulty brake part from the same batch. 

Thus using batch numbers, Maruti Suzuki not only found the issue, but they also managed to save their reputation as well as the lives of more than 20,000 users from possible accidents that might have happened otherwise.

All hail to Batch Tracking! 

Where does Zoho Inventory factor into this? 

With the all-new Batch tracking feature on Zoho Inventory, you can generate reports on your batches. You can keep precise records of where your products come from and where they are going.

To activate Batch Tracking you would need to be subscribed to the Standard Plan of Zoho Inventory or higher.   

To check out how exactly this works on Zoho Inventory, please click here.