Batch Tracking With TrakOp ERP for Bottled Water Businesses?

July 8, 2025

Inventory management is not limited to counting inventory and fulfilling customer demand; it has extended and is focused more on maintaining product quality. TrakOp ERP is a comprehensive solution for all your bottled water business needs. It offers advanced features that help you enhance inventory management, ensuring optimal stock levels. One such crucial feature is “batch tracking.”

This blog explores everything about batch tracking and how TrakOp ERP for bottled water enables batch tracking.

What is batch tracking in the bottled water business?

Batch tracking refers to tracking water bottles in groups based on production under similar conditions and using the same raw material. The individual group is allotted a unique batch, lot, or serial number. They are unique identification numbers that contain all the information concerning that specific production run.

The batch number consists of:

Date when the product was produced
Expiration date and best-before date
From where the raw material was procured
Production line or facility
Quality control data
Storage conditions
Shipping and distribution data

The need for batch tracking in the bottled water business

There are various challenges a bottled water business faces without robust batch tracking. These challenges necessitate batch tracking to ensure product safety, maintain quality, optimise operations, and protect the company’s long-term viability.

Product recalls and safety.

If product quality issues arise, without batch tracking, it is difficult to identify other affected bottles, leading to the spread of products, financial losses, and damage to your brand reputation. Manual handling of affected bottles is time-consuming and error-prone. Lacking batch tracking can lead to non-compliance, fines, and even business closure. If the products are not recalled promptly, they pose a direct health risk to consumers, which can have severe legal and ethical consequences for the business.

Inventory management and efficiency

Without batch tracking, you have limited visibility, making it difficult to implement inventory management strategies such as “First-in, First-out.” Not knowing which bottle is old risks inventory sitting on the shelves for too long, degrading plastic, and compromising the water quality. This takes up warehouse space and increases holding costs.

Manual inventory counting is prone to errors and inaccurate stock reports, resulting in stockouts and overstocking. Locating product locations for order fulfillment can slow down picking, packing, and shipping processes. If the water bottle reaches the customers without a batch number, tracing its origin can be challenging and make it difficult to understand the scope of the problem. This can make returns difficult or even impossible. Tracking reusable empty water bottles without batch tracking can lead to losses and inefficiencies in the return and refill process.

Quality control and improvement

The batch number enables tracing the product back to its production, raw materials, equipment, and personnel involved. Identifying the root cause of the issue is challenging without a batch number. Batch data provides valuable information about production efficiency, quality variations, and potential areas for improvement that cannot be obtained without a batch number.

You can’t track and analyze quality trends, which makes it difficult to maintain consistent product quality over time. Recurring quality issues due to a lack of traceability can severely hamper your brand image and reputation.

Supply chain management

It is difficult to track suppliers if the issue arises in a specific batch of raw material. Manual operations make it impossible to track the product movement throughout the supply chain. This makes optimizing distribution routes difficult, resulting in delayed deliveries.

Ways TrakOp ERP helps bottled water batch management

TrakOp offers ERP for bottled water delivery businesses to automate and streamline various inventory management operations. It provides robust features, including batch tracking that enhances product traceability, empowering companies to comply with regulations. The ways TrakOp helps bottled water batch management are:

Safety and compliance

TrakOp’s ERP enables end-to-end traceability, providing detailed batch tracking from raw material procurement through packaging, warehousing, and delivery. Each bottle is linked to a batch that encompasses a complete audit trail. The system enables recording quality test findings and allows businesses to monitor water quality by batch.

The bottled water ERP allows you to set definite numbers to automate quality control, ensuring compliance with industry regulations and standards. Additionally, it can streamline document management, scheduling audits, and recording results, simplifying the requirements for the bottled water industry.

Expiration date tracking

This system helps you track expiration dates and best-before dates of each batch and send automated alerts for approaching dates, preventing product spoilage and financial loss. Knowing the age of each batch enables you to implement inventory management strategies, such as FIFO, FEFO, or LIFO, minimizing the risk of product degradation.

Automated inventory sequencing

The bottled water ERP provides real-time visibility into inventory levels, locations, and availability across a single or multiple warehouses. It provides accurate data, removing manual errors and preventing overstocking and stockouts. The system can automate and optimize picking and packing processes, improving warehouse efficiency and reducing labor costs.

Moreover, the system can trigger purchase orders or manufacturing orders based on the threshold defined, automating replenishment. This ensures that you never run out of inventory and have optimal stock levels for continuous operations.

Smooth recall processes

Batch tracking makes product recalls due to quality issues or defects easy. The system identification of affected bottles enables businesses to pinpoint the exact batch that needs to be recalled, rather than recalling all the products. This minimizes the scope of recalls, reduces financial losses, operational disruptions, and damage to brand reputation. The system can generate comprehensive reports on affected batches, aiding in investigations and communication with regulatory bodies and consumers.

Improved product quality

ERP’s batch tracking enables businesses to trace the product issues to their origin, facilitating effective root cause analysis and implementation of improvement actions. The system collects and analyzes batch-specific data on quality performance to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement in production processes, improving product quality. It also helps you track supplier quality performance by linking batches to their suppliers, enabling quick identification and reliable supplier management.

Better supply chain

The bottled water ERP provides end-to-end visibility across the entire supply chain, from raw material procurement to delivery. It helps businesses plan, reduce costs, and enhance collaboration with suppliers and distributors. It can analyze sales data and current inventory levels to forecast demand. This optimizes production and procurement, minimizes waste, and ensures timely order fulfillment.

TrakOp integrates a delivery module with ERP to provide features like route optimization and delivery scheduling. This helps businesses reduce fuel consumption, minimize delivery times, and carbon footprint.

Cost reduction

Accurate inventory sequencing and expiration date tracking can help you minimize product obsolescence and spoilage. Optimizing stock levels prevents overstocking and understocking, reducing carrying costs, storage costs, and lost sales due to stockouts. Automating manual inventory management tasks, including order processing, inventory updates, and invoicing, reduces manual efforts, human errors, and administrative costs. Targeted recalls mitigate financial losses significantly. The route optimization and efficient delivery planning lower fuel consumption and delivery costs.

Inventory batch tracking strategies TrakOp supports

TrakOp ERP supports various batch tracking strategies to optimize operations for businesses dealing with perishable or time-sensitive products, such as bottled water. Some of these strategies TrakOp supports are:

FIFO (First-in, First-out)

It is a crucial strategy for bottled water, considering the over-time degradation of plastic bottles and the importance of freshness. When new batches of bottled water are produced or received, the system records their precise date of inventory. You can configure the system to automatically prioritize the oldest batches for picking and shipping. This ensures that when a new order comes, the first product to enter the warehouse is used.

The system also tracks expiration dates, complementing FIFO and providing an extra layer of control to ensure products are consumed well before they expire. Additionally, it provides reports and alerts to monitor inventory age, ensuring older stock is out efficiently.

FEFO (First-expired, First-out)

FEFO is a critical strategy for bottled water businesses, addressing the product’s freshness and safety. The system records the precise expiration date for every water bottle batch. The system prioritizes the batches that are closer to their expiration dates for picking and shipping. This ensures that the water is sold and consumed while it is still fresh and safe to use.

The system can generate automated alerts when batches approach their expiration dates, prompting faster actions. Systematically moving products with the earliest expiration date reduces the chances of expired or unsellable inventory, minimizing waste and associated costs. Ensuring fresh water for your customers contributes to building customer loyalty and mitigating health risks.

Conclusion

TrakOp’s ERP for bottled water businesses leverages batch management to offer precision, efficiency, and intelligence to every aspect of inventory management operations, from production to delivery and financial management. Batch tracking aims to improve operational efficiency, task productivity, and customer satisfaction while reducing holding costs. Are you looking to implement batch tracking into your bottled water business? Schedule a meeting with our experts to discuss your pain areas and see how they can assist you.

Hope You Enjoyed the Read!

ravi garg, trakop, founder signature image

Ravi Garg Founder & CEO

He loves to explore. His passion for helping delivery industries in all aspects flows through in the vision he has. In addition to providing smart solution to make delivery process flawless, Ravi also likes to write sometimes to make it easier for people from business industry looking for digital solutions.