No picking strategy to configure, no dropdown to forget. Allocation is FIFO by default and switches to FEFO automatically the moment a lot carries an expiry date.
FIFO
The default for everything without an expiry date. Oldest stock leaves first, so nothing sits in a corner aging while newer pallets get picked from the front.
FEFO
Kicks in automatically for any lot with an expiry date. The nearest-expiry lot is always consumed first, which is why expired product stops reaching customers. Essential for food, cosmetics, and supplements.
The switch between the two is per product, per lot, and automatic. There is no organization-wide strategy setting to configure or get wrong. How allocation picks the lot walks through a worked example.
Three lots of raw sugar. SUG-A arrived 3 March and expires 30 September. SUG-B arrived later, on 12 March, but expires sooner, on 15 August. SUG-C has no expiry recorded. Because at least one lot is dated, the product allocates FEFO and takes SUG-B first. Under FIFO it would have taken SUG-A and left SUG-B to expire on the shelf.
| Lot | Quantity | Received | Expires | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SUG-A | 20 kg | 3 March | 30 September | |
| SUG-B | 35 kg | 12 March | 15 August | TAKEN |
| SUG-C | 15 kg | 1 April | none recorded |
SUG-B arrived after SUG-A and expires before it, because the supplier had held it longer. FIFO would ship the fresh pallet and leave this one to be written off.
Because every movement is a logged transaction, a lot's history is a chain you can walk in both directions: which supplier delivery it came from, which batches consumed it, which orders shipped its output. This is what batch tracking has to mean to be worth anything during a recall, and it is the difference between bounding a problem and guessing at it. Tracing a batch in both directions shows what you can ask of the record afterwards, and the movement log is where each step of the chain is written.
Supplier delivery
Inbound entry creates LOT-0142 with cost + expiry
QC inspection
PASS releases the lot as AVAILABLE
Production batch
Batch #88 consumes 40 kg from LOT-0142
Finished lot
Output LOT-0150, costed from what was consumed
Order & shipment
Order #1042 ships LOT-0150 to the customer
Which word you use is mostly a question of industry. Food, cosmetics and supplements say batch; engineering and most US regulation say lot. They describe the same record: a quantity of stock that was received or produced together and is traced as one unit.
So there is nothing to choose here and no separate mode to turn on. If you came looking for batch tracking software, this is it. The part worth checking is not the vocabulary but whether the record survives production: a batch that is consumed into a second batch has to carry its ancestry forward, or the trace stops at the intermediate. A worked recall trace shows where that usually breaks.
Lots approaching their expiry date surface on the dashboard while there is still time to run a promotion, prioritize them in production, or plan the write-off deliberately instead of discovering it during a count. Setting up expiry alerts covers where those dates come from, and manufacturing traceability software is the wider category view.
FIFO/FEFO allocation and end-to-end traceability without a single setting to maintain.
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