NIR Spectroscopy is a useful technique throughout various stages of the manufacturing process but is particularly useful for raw materials identification and verification. If the materials to be identified are spectroscopically dissimilar, it is often only necessary to use a simple distance measure such as a spectral difference for identification. If the spectra are similar, on the other hand, it may be necessary to use more sophisticated techniques which take into consideration both the intra- and inter-material spectral variation for identification and classification.