The paper was presented at the Polish Logistics Congress Logistics 2008 – “New challenges – new solutions”, Poznań, May 7 – 9, 2008.
GS1 standards, characterized by their universality and international reach, can be successfully applied to tracking batches of raw materials and products in food industry supply chains. They allow for increased speed in obtaining information about processed and shipped goods, thereby enhancing the safety of products offered to consumers. GS1 standards can also be used in internal traceability systems within individual entities of the fish product supply chain. GS1 standard application identifiers can be used to label individual locations with barcodes, such as production halls, warehouses, individual workstations, and even employees. Implementing an online traceability system provides real-time information about ongoing production and storage processes. Furthermore, registering operations in a database enables the generation of various types of reports that increase the efficiency of production process management.
Introduction
Growing consumer needs and the fact that most goods are only available in certain areas of our planet have led to a massive development of international logistics processes, particularly the transport of products between countries on different continents.
The globalization of the modern world has made standards essential, enabling the rapid acquisition and transmission of data during commercial operations. The previous use of many standards in different industries, and even more so on individual continents, caused enormous difficulties in conducting international trade transactions. The solution to these problems was the establishment in the 1990s of the international EAN.UCC standard, combined with EAN – European Article Numbering and UCC – Uniform Code Council. This action enabled the standardization of international data exchange regarding shipped goods, and consequently accelerated shipment logistics and made these operations much more transparent.
In 2005, the EAN.UCC standard was renamed GS1 – Global System, Global Standards, Global Solution, which helped emphasize the global nature of these standards in 145 countries around the world.
Information transmitted in supply chains is important not only from the point of view of commercial processes and financial settlements, but also due to food safety and the reliability of information passed through individual links of a given chain. Therefore, the more precise the information sent between operators, the greater the safety of the offered product. Data transmitted during commercial operations is closely related to traceability, i.e., the ability to track the movement of food, feed, livestock, or substances added to food or feed at all stages of production, processing, and distribution.
Traceability has been a legal requirement since January 1, 2005, under Article 18 of Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 January 2002 laying down the general principles and requirements of food law, establishing the European Food Safety Authority and laying down procedures in matters of food safety. Moreover, the national Act of August 25, 2006, on food and nutrition safety included a penalty for failing to apply traceability requirements. Article 100(7) of the aforementioned Act states that: anyone who does not perform activities related to the identification of food suppliers or recipients, contrary to the obligation specified in Article 18 of Regulation No 178/2002, is subject to a fine.
The above legal regulations require operators to implement traceability systems in supply chains. Global GS1 standards provide modern solutions to meet these requirements.
GS1 standards and their use in traceability systems
GS1 standards constitute sets of requirements defining the rules for international data exchange in commercial operations across many industries, including the food sector. The global application of the standards allows them to be used in traceability systems as well, where they enable the rapid acquisition of required information about a sought-after product batch or shipment.
GS1 standards are based on a codified system of numbering various information regarding a shipped product. For data exchange in accordance with GS1 standards, the following designations are most important: GTIN – Global Trade Item Number, GLN – Global Location Number, and SSCC – Serial Shipping Container Code. Increasing the amount of information transmitted with a product is possible through the use of other Application Identifiers (AI) and GS1-128 barcode labels, which allow for the encoding of additional information, e.g., batch number, quantity and weight of the product, or expiration date.
The wide range of GS1 standard applications has also allowed for their use in the fish industry, where they enable the tracking of batches of raw materials, products, or packaging in the supply chain and in production and storage processes at fish industry operators.
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