As the name suggests, the material tracking function involves tracking the material that is processed to a create a finished product as it passes through a line or a process.

The primary purpose of this is to provide the components of the line or the processing machines with information about where the material is located and when particular processing operations are to be started or new setpoints adopted. The start and end of a piece of material are particularly important, for example to adjust the lateral guides in good time when changing material or to adopt new setpoints for controlling the thickness of a mill stand.

For ibaQDR, the length of the material is also important, as the ultimate aim is to map the measured values to the length of the finished product.

In terms of the tracking data, each piece of material is assigned a tracking ID, which is normally linked to the material or product ID from the production planning system.

Depending on the line type, the material tracking system must be capable of tracking multiple products (tracked parts) that are simultaneously located in the line.

For processes such as a strip processing line, the material tracking system also has to be able to deal with different production scenarios (1:n, n:1 and n:m production).