Last Tuesday, we had the pleasure of attending the National Manufacturing & Conference at the Citywest Hotel. The event was a success judging by the full car park and the queues for the coffee vendors.
One of the headline sponsors at the event was GS1 Ireland. For those who don’t know GS1, they are a global non-for-profit organisation, with over 2 million organisations across the globe use GS1 Standards today, to identify, capture and share information about their products, services, locations and assets. Personally, we see them as the guardians of the GTIN (Global Trade Identifier Number) and barcodes we see on every product packaging but they offer a lot more services in terms of traceability.
GS1’s Director of Standards and Solutions, Denis O’Brien gave an engaging and thought provoking talk on traceability. The key point of the talk was to highlight the evolution of traceability in the supply chain. For several years, it has be a legal requirement for all manufactures to have ‘one up, one down’ approach to traceability.
This approach is still the legal requirement but its become glaringly obvious that it is no longer meeting the needs of complicated supply chains that businesses face today. Denis suggested that the new type of traceability is built on an event. An event can be each time a barcode is scanned then the data is stored and becomes readily available all along the supply chain (E.g. manufacturer-distributor-manufacturer-wholesaler-retailer-end user).
So how can this new type of traceability save you money?
The benefits:
- Faster and cheaper regulatory compliance
- New and expanded markets and customers
- Reduction of business liability costs (insurance) – main one!
- Higher recall efficiencies and lower costs
- Reduction in product waste
- Simplified and more reliable data exchange
Please contact us if you need any advice on printing barcodes for traceability purposes.
