A sense of security is one of the fundamental values delivered to the customer, and the key to achieving it has become a system for tracking both the product’s flow path and the conditions of that flow throughout the entire supply chain. Product responsibility requires that in the event of a threat or other irregularity, the product must be withdrawn from the market and from all partners in the supply chain as quickly as possible.
Many cases of safety threats identified on the market (for example, mixed-up medicine packaging endangering patients’ lives, leaking hot water bottles posing a burn risk to newborns, mechanical contamination, or dioxins in food products causing poisoning) cause the customer to pay attention to the product, the manufacturer, the product ingredients, information about the technology and production conditions attached to the product, and also to choose a safe place to purchase the product. Partners in the supply chain select suppliers, logistics operators, carriers, and sales networks, while requiring guarantees (for example, quality certificates, certifications of specific industry standards, periodic inspection reports) in the processes of production, warehousing, transport, and sales. All this is to deliver a safe product to the market and effectively enforce quality in the supply chain, and through this, to take care of the image of the product and the manufacturer, as well as customer trust and increased sales revenue. An important goal is also to reduce the risk of incurring costs of product withdrawal (reverse logistics) and to meet legal requirements.
Building the brand of a “safe product” and the trust of both the customer and partners in the supply chain has triggered a turbulent search for methods and tools enabling the systematic localization and tracking of products in the full supply chain (generally referred to as traceability) and immediate reaction in case of detected irregularities and the withdrawal of the product from all places on the market and in supply chains to the market.
Safety in the supply chain
The concept of full responsibility for consumer safety and the quality of products delivered in global supply chains is quite complex and includes, among others:
• identification of all product ingredients (for example, content of metals, dioxins, pesticides, antibiotics) and a guarantee of the truthfulness of this information (no possibility of introducing other ingredients after the production process and packaging of the product are completed) – and thus protecting the consumer against bioterrorism
• a guarantee of appropriate quality of production, transport, or warehousing processes for the applied production technology and product quality parameters (certified in various countries around the world by quality systems or standards – for example, ISO, HACCP, BRC, IFS, SQF)
• exclusion of the possibility of product counterfeiting – consisting of reliable, unambiguous, and undeniable identification and control of every section of the flow of materials, semi-finished products, and finished goods, as well as inventory storage in the supply chain
• the ability to quickly locate a product on the market and in the supply chain and to select groups of products originating from the same batch / production series or delivery batch
• guaranteeing the immediate withdrawal from the market and all locations in the supply chain of products that threaten the safety of life and health.
Product tracking
Tracking products in global supply chains requires linking internal data (for example, product serial number, production batch number, production date – internal traceability) and external data (for example, location number of the entity, logistics unit number – external traceability). The scheme of product tracking in the supply chain is presented in Figure 1.
In the surveyed enterprises, the GS1 standard is mainly used for tracking products in external chains (in over 90% of enterprises):
• GTIN number (Global Trade Item Number) for product identification and SSCC number (Serial Shipping Container Code) for logistics unit identification,
• GLN number (Global Location Number) for identification – from whom the product was received or to whom it was sent.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 1/2009.