Traceability

Food safety, product tracing, and product recalls are currently at the forefront of both government regulations and industry concerns around the world. Companies are facing numerous track and trace requirements, not always easily concealable. Moreover technology offers various ways of achieving traceability and many solutions exist for national, regional and global supply chain participants. As a result, to facilitate trade today, it is necessary to implement international standards and ensure interoperability of traceability systems. And that’s where GS1 comes in!

The GS1 Traceability Standard is a business process standard describing the traceability process independently from the choice of enabling technologies.

It defines minimum requirements for companies of all sizes across industry sectors and corresponding GS1 Standards used within information management tools.

• The Standard maximizes the use of globally established and implemented GS1 System tools that uniquely identify any “traceable item”, describe the creation of accurate records of transactions, and provide for fast data communication about the traceable item between trading partners.
• It meets the core legislative and business need to cost-effectively trace back (one step down) and track forward (one step up) at any point along the whole length of the supply chain, no matter how many trading partners and business process steps are involved and how many national borders are crossed.

The GS1 Traceability Standard defines business rules and minimum requirements to be followed when designing and implementing a traceability system. They are clustered around a matrix of roles and responsibilities for each step of the traceability process.

The Plan and Organize sub-process determines how to assign, collect, share and keep traceability data. Furthermore, it determines how to manage links between inputs, internal processes, and outputs. It is a prerequisite phase.

The Align Master Data sub -process determines how to assign identifications to the parties and physical locations, trade items and if appropriate to assets. It also determines how to exchange Master Data with trading partners. 

The Record Traceability Data sub-process determines how to assign, apply and capture traceable items identification and how to collect, share and store traceability data during the physical flow. 

The Request Trace sub-process determines how to initiate and respond to a traceability request.

The Use Information sub-process enables the use of the previous processes to take appropriate action as required by legal and business requirements.