With product traceability, the owner or the manager of a company gets a detailed view of their products both in the warehouse and outside of it, which helps them strategically place orders from those suppliers that offer high-quality products that will make their customers satisfied. But this is only one of the many advantages product traceability brings to companies.
What is product traceability?
Product traceability is the possibility of tracing a product during different stages of production, processing and distribution and it plays a big role in company competitiveness on the market, primarily through different systems for quality and risk management.
D-software company has started its own innovations and, modifying some features of its own ERP system, it has developed a unique system of categorization of used products in the automotive parts industry. The newly-developed system now makes the entering, tracking and export control of the used parts of cars possible, which closes the entire process of the so-called pre-renewal conditioned by ecological and economical profitability, and which consists of gathering, demystification and sorting of cipher-known labels of the used part of the car. By individual tracking of the used part of the car, a popularity coefficient and the frequency of renewal are acquired, which gives the manufacturer of new car parts a clear indication which ecological and economical direction to take.
This kind of detailed product traceability wouldn't be possible without barcode use, the most represented and thus the most well-known GS1 traceability standard (GS1 – a non-profit organization for development and maintenance of global standards for business communication). In spite of the fact that legal obligation for barcode use doesn't exist, we can easily say that barcodes ensure higher security, reliability, speed and efficiency of supply chains, which is why their use is unavoidable.
Barcodes ensure greater reliability, but they also save money
Product traceability via barcode provides the trades with a series of benefits: not only will they have a detailed view of all their products in the warehouse and outside of it, but the information about when, from who and for how much a products has been bought, but also to whom the product has been sold, for how much and when, will become available. In the case of the product being returned by the customer, thanks to product traceability, the trader can easily gain information about who packaged the product when it left the warehouse or which supplier the product has been bought from, if the product is, let's say, returned because of poor quality. These kinds of information make possible for the owner or the manager of an organization to strategically purchase from suppliers that have high-quality products and that will make their customers satisfied.
To describe how crucial product traceability is for business, we will use an example from the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, every medicine has its expiration date. But imagine you had to search the pharmacy every single day, open every single box and check the expiration date on every product. A Sisyphean task, right? This is when you use product traceability and get the information about which medicine should be written off because of their expiration date in only a few clicks.
Besides, in the pharmaceutical industry, a detailed system of product traceability can be of great use to collect old, expired medications in pharmacies. While the end user of a medicine throws the unused dosage of a medicine (pharmaceutical waste) in a container, which marks the end of their contact with the product, pharmacists scan those medications later so they can gain better insight into which medicines the users usually don't use, but keep in their home pharmacies instead.
The third example we will use today is from the food industry, where product traceability isn't a choice, but a rule. Imagine a person buying vegetable in a local store. If the potential buyer wants to buy a local, high-quality product, he will be interested in the locations the vegetable has been through (from production to retail) and if it had been treated with any chemicals. But product traceability can also go in the opposite direction, not only from the buyer to the supplier, but also from the supplier to the buyer of the product, in case there is a necessity of withdrawing certain products from consumption. This shows that product traceability is also an important criteria for product quality and safety.
A good ERP system is a base for product traceability
We trust that these examples for product traceability have been able to show and explain that multiple departments of a business has to be involved into the traceability system: department for quality, logistics, manufacturing, IT department. Of course, this requires the use of certain IT systems, and manufacturing companies almost always use multiple systems that require to be connected into one to ensure automatic data exchange.
It is necessary to connect five processes in regards to products traceability: (1) material reception from the supplier, (2) the introduction of the material into the transformation process, (3) the transformation process, (4) the exit of the material/product from the transformation process and (5) the delivery of the product to the customers. As we have mentioned several times in the article, the main precondition for this are barcodes and barcode scanning equipment. But it is important to mention that all these systems need to be connected to the ERP system because it actually gives the trader a bird view on their business.
Due to the complexity of this kind of business, D-software has developed a multipurpose manager Dimension Management System that offers complete control over warehouse and commodity business to its users. The system is specific because it unites the business-information system, the warehouse management system and the content management system, which enables you to be aware of the real state of the products in supply in every moment and ensures long-term money-saving due to the fact that you are renting only one system and not paying for any licenses.
For more information or a cooperation proposal, feel free to contact us.
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