Specifications

Info about Specifications

The Specification module helps you create the technical details about your product (it also helps capture them about your ingredients)

There are several roll-ups that will auto populate fields for you (e.g. Ingredient Declaration, Countries of Origin) whilst providing space for you to collate and then generate your own Product Specification document with full version control.

The majority of the fields are to compile information specifically for the generation of the Spec Document. As such they should contain information designed for your client’s needs.

Specs Tile

The Specs tile lists some basic reports that highlight those specification documents that are in progress or have been scheduled for review

Nutritional

The Nutritional tab allows you to set the values for various key Nutrition Facts e.g. Energy kJ, Protein, Carbohydrate etc

There are three options:

1)Referenced - References values from an item in the McCance and Widdowson database 2)Calculated – Rolled-Up nutrition calculation based on the nutritional values of the recipe’s ingredients (manufactured products only) 3)Manual or Lab Results – From lab testing for manufactured products or supplier specs for purchased products

N.b. When set via calculated it is possible for one of the underlying ingredient’s nutrition values to change which would therefore change the calculated Nutrition for any dependent products. A warning will appear displaying the newly calculated values if this has occured.

Allergens

The allergens tab allows you to highlight if any off the major allergens are present in the product, line factory, suuplier. These values can then be displayed in the Spec Doc.

If any of the recipe’s ingredients have allergens then the dependent Product will have the allergen set automatically. 

N.b. when you change the allergen record of an ingredient it may take a couple of minutes for the dependent Products to be updated

Chemical, Micro, Physical

The functionality on all three tabs allows you set values for various fields that may be needed within the Specification document. 

QAS

Quality Attributes can be added to the Specification document via the QAS tab.

You are able to create multiple examples of both Green and Red along with a written description of Appearance, Taste, Texture, Aroma. You are able to upload one image per QAS record, but you can have many QAS records per specification.

Packaging Options

You may provide your product in several different packaging options. Add each of the options as separate Packaging Option records. This has the added benefit of allowing to specify different Shelf life depending on the precise packaging

Appendix

The Appendix works much like a document store, with the additional focus that the documents relate to the Product specification. A good example would be the “material safety data sheet”.

Specification Documents

The system uses a template to generate the Specification Document for you. Press the “Generate” button to create the document. Click to view the PDF. It is important to double check the document, making changes to the relevant data in the system and recreating the Document by pressing “Generate” again. Once you are happy with the document you can LOCK the record. Any further alterations to the document should require you to issue a new version.
To create a new version of the Specification document, press Add Specification Document. (There should be a record for each version of the document you issue.) Provide a reason for the new version and log the date of the update and who is issuing it.