Traceability issue with product receiving?

Good morning, 

Hoping someone can help me. We are a 3PL that receives finished pet food from our customer (a manufacturer.) We store the product and distribute it.

We often receive product before our customer sends us paperwork for the load and/or enters the shipment information into our WMS system, so the product sits in our staging area until the information/documentation is received.

If we were to have an audit, would this be a traceability issue?

I deal with storage and distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables. We refuse to receive the load till the shipper has sent us the proper paper work.

If you tell the shipper that the truck will just sit, the shipper will get you what you need in a hurry. 

Ideally yes, you'd want the paperwork all in hand ahead of time.  But, having worked for a 3PL in the past, I get it and we're often put into hard places by the customers we service. 

I think it's perfectly defendable to receive it using your standard receiving form, crosschecking that it is from your approved clients and that the product itself is approved, but then immediately place it on hold to document that you have not yet received the full paperwork.  I'd update the hold procedure to call out that items received without full documentation will be placed on hold and segregated until documents are received.  While it's not in your WMS, your hold records will have the product, lot coding, case counts/weights, etc., everything needed for purposes of traceability for this period.

I agree with jfrey's take on this, of course in an ideal world you would have all documents as part of the shipment. But if that is not possible then keeping the product held and segregated until all documents and files are accounted for should work. The physical product should be tagged as "held" as well with some indicator to separate it from other held materials. I'm picturing a scenario where multiple trucks of material are received at once and you're waiting on complete documentation for all of them. Each shipment should be a part of a separate hold and tagged as such, because traceability would demand that you can differentiate between different shipments.

I appreciate the feedback! Thank you all so much.

I agree with the responses above but rather than putting it into your staging area, I'd create if you can a physical quarantine area and certainly put it into a specific quality hold location on your WMS.  Too many times I've seen items "not accepted" or left in a pending state then accidentally put onto a system by someone unaware there is a quality issue.