Process traceability is the ability to identify and link the steps, conditions, resources, and records involved in making or servicing a product. In manufacturing, it commonly connects a work order, batch, lot, or serial number to the operations performed, materials used, equipment involved, process parameters, inspections, operators, timestamps, and approvals.
Process traceability is used in MES, ERP, quality systems, digital travelers, electronic batch records, and integration workflows where production history must be reconstructed from reliable records. It supports questions such as which routing steps were completed, which revision of an instruction was used, which machine or tool was applied, and which inspection results were recorded for a specific unit or lot.
It is related to, but not identical to, product traceability or material genealogy. Product traceability often focuses on where a product or lot came from and where it went. Material genealogy focuses on parent-child relationships between components, lots, batches, or serialized items. Process traceability focuses on how the work was performed and what evidence was captured during execution.
Process traceability should also not be confused with an audit trail. An audit trail records changes to data or system actions, while process traceability records or links the operational facts of production. In many systems, both are used together to understand manufacturing history.