Why is Traceability Important for Customer Safety?
By: Teachable Tech | June 29, 2022
Traceability plays an important role in customer safety when it comes to either food and pharmaceutical products or industrial goods. It is the ability to identify and trace the manufacturing and distribution of unsafe or poor-quality products such as food, automobiles, or aircraft.
By implementing barcoding systems that encourage high-level tracking and tracing capabilities, organizations can exercise more granular control over their production process. This helps them make safer products of higher quality and can be optimized for continuous improvement.
Why is Traceability Important to Customers?
Customer safety items such as medicines and food items can cause serious health issues if their product is defective. Traceability helps organizations track and trace the defected lot within the supply chain for faster product recalls.
Food Traceability:
Traceability of food products makes it easier to identify and eliminate illegal activities. Customers can easily track the source of the product, common allergens used in the process, and the organic raw materials by product barcode.
The producers want to build trust among the customers by providing quality and valid data certificates about the product. Supply chain benefits from food traceability because it improves product information, eliminates food waste, and improves the safety of products consumed.
Public Health and Consumer Protection:
Healthcare tracking solutions help to upgrade patients' security, track medication and ensure that the right care is being administered to the right patient. Barcode technology provides solutions for everyday processes to ensure that the patient receives the correct treatment. Some advantages of traceability in healthcare:
- Patient Safety
- Preventing Fraudulent
- Enabling correct patient records and effective product recalls
- Enabling regulatory compliance
Technical Industry:
Industrial goods such as automotive components, military components, aerospace components, and industrial machinery can pose a serious risk to end users if not validated or certified properly.
The product traceability system helps organizations check the product quality of each component and know what component is used in which bigger machine.
- Improve root cause analysis
- Helps continuous improvement
- Facilitates Value stream mapping
- Increase quality and engagement
How to Improve Traceability
Tracking and Record-Keeping
Product traceability systems allow you to keep track of product recalls, identifying all the affected products so you can better inform the public when you put out the notice. You can keep records of batch numbers, product order numbers, and production timestamps.
Supply Chain Visibility
Traceability is an important part of the process because it allows you to see your entire supply chain at each tier of operations. It also has the ability to increase your efficiency and gives you the chance to make changes to your shipping journey when unexpected events happen.
Mock Recalls
Mock recall is an exercise that tests your traceability system by tracing a product’s journey within your supply chain and verifying your communication systems.