assembly serialization and traceability

What methods do you guys use for maintaining lot and/or board traceability? When I worked in med. products, we used travelers that we recorded everything on, then serialized them at the end of the build. Not as effective as up front serialization, but easier to apply, since labeling at a hand station (post solder) makes more sense than doing it at a machine station unless you actually have a machine to do it for you (laser, labeler).

Anyone hear of any other methods, used successfully? Here we have a very lousy system of date and operator stamping, which is time consuming and (get this!) I just discovered that the ink is water soluble. Seems that the operators on line 2 (the fine pitch line, OA paste and aqueous wash on all fine pitch boards) were getting written up for not stamping and couldn't believe they were forgetting it that often.

Anyway, we couldn't lot trace ourselves out of a wet paper bag, but we're also trying to avoid implementing a full blown GMP/QSR type system. Any help? Thanks.........

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