• COLUMN: MODERN VALVE SOLUTIONS •
Effective Product Traceability
With innovative traceable valve technology, cloud-based, digital certificates provide efficiency gains and substantial cost reductions within a relatively short timeframe.
• By Bob Donnelly- Vice President of Business Development – Flo-Tite Valves & Controls
Bob Donnelly
Bob Donnelly is the Vice President of Business Development for Flo-Tite Valves & Controls.
12
COLUMN
Across the pharmaceutical industry, valve traceability and certification are still managed largely through manual workflows. Incoming valves are often placed in quarantine due to an end-to-end traceability gap between supplier reference numbers and customer tag numbers.
The core challenge is each valve typically consists of multiple wetted components, which include body and end connections as well as heat numbers. Ensuring that the correct combination of parts align with the correct tag( and also backed by the right certificates) requires extensive manual effort from quality control and maintenance teams.
In practice, this is managed by spread sheets and simple physical markings with manila tags or plastic strips. However, during welding and installation, these markings are frequently removed, damaged, or lost.
Addressing the Problem After a potential quarantine period, the valves are typically disassembled, welding tags are created, and piping work – such as welding and pickling – begin. At that point, the originally assembled valve is no longer intact. This is a risk given the final installed configuration may not match the original documentation.
To recover traceability, teams must work backwards through welding logs and manually confirm which heat numbers were welded on each side. Confirmation of supplier certificates then needs to be confirmed. The entire process is very consuming and costly.
Often, the process is abandoned since the back tracking of certificates for dismantled or rewelded valves is tedious and complex. The solution is to raise the standard for traceability from static PDF documents to structured data that can be searched, machine-verified, and above all, trusted.
The Solution Fully digitized certificates and traceability software has been developed that provides 24 / 7 access to valve certificates and full traceability of all wetted parts, covering seven traceable components per ball valve. This eliminates the traditional dependency on static PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, and manual cross referencing during commissioning and audits.
Fully digitized certificates and traceability software eliminates traditional dependency on static PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, and manual cross referencing.
Valve World Americas | May 2026 | www. valve-world-americas. com