Leveraging New Technologies to Enhance Supply Chain Visibility and Traceability
By Jaclyn Jaeger
Today, there are many innovative technologies helping companies enhance visibility across their global supply chains. But before all of the potential use cases can be realized, industry must first come together to collectively overcome the implementation hurdles.
GS1, a neutral, nonprofit organization that sets voluntary, global traceability standards, describes the supply chain lifecycle as being made up of three distinct pillars:
• Traceability: Each product is traced through the supply chain lifecycle so that if a product is damaged, recalled, or has expired, it can easily be traced. Traceability is especially critical for tracking items that have a shelf life or that require cold storage, like fresh produce and vaccines.
• Inventory management: Tracking and monitoring product movement through the supply chain, ultimately leveraging data to improve decision-making related to order frequency, quantity, and timing to maintain adequate product supply while avoiding excessive inventory.
• Sustainability: Reducing a company’s carbon footprint and investing in greener options, such as reused or recycled products, reduced packaging, local sourcing, and electric carrier fleets.
In a recent three-part webinar series, hosted by GS1, supply chain experts and industry leaders discussed standards and best practices for achieving end-to-end supply chain visibility. This article will explore the first and second pillars: practical steps toward achieving traceability, and how to better track and manage inventory through the use of innovative technologies.
A common standard
Product traceability and inventory management are only possible if all stakeholders in the end-to-end supply chain play from the same playbook. For millions of companies and their trading partners globally, the GS1 Standards serve as that playbook.
The GS1 Standards enable importers, manufacturers, and their trading partners to seamlessly communicate about any item in their supply chain through globally unique identification and digital data. GS1’s most recognizable standard is the GS1 UPC barcodes, used to identify more than one billion products globally.
Each UPC barcode, scanned at the point of sale to identify a product, is encoded with a series of numbers, called the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), located at the bottom of the barcode. GTINs identify product types at any packaging level – such as by consumer unit, case, or pallet. Groups of items, such as production batches, can be further identified by batch or lot number, expiration date, or by other similar data elements.
Additionally, by using a Global Location Number (GLN), businesses can identify parties involved in transactions and where products are located along the supply chain, gathering pertinent information such as name, address, and purpose. GS1 uses the analogy, “GLN does for parties and locations what barcodes do for products.”
Industry-specific implementation guides
The “GS1 General Specifications Standard” is the foundational document describing to member companies how to use identification keys, data attributes, and barcodes. Many industries use the GS1 Standard as a blueprint to develop industry-specific implementation guides to address supply chain issues unique to their industry.
There’s an important compliance message in all of this: Do not be a bystander in the development of industry guidelines for supply chain traceability, like the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) Standards, and the International Federation for Produce Standards (IFPS), which developed a series of implementation guidelines for fresh foods, in collaboration with GS1.
“You have to get involved in those efforts,” said Jane Proctor, vice president of policy and issues management at the Canadian Produce Marketing Association (CPMA). “You have to take control as an industry to make sure there are guidance documents that work for your industry.”
Blake Harris, technical director at the Global Food Traceability Center (GFTC) at the Institute of Food Technologists, stressed that it’s not just industry participation that’s important, but also participation from individual companies that make up that industry. Their voice needs to be part of that conversation, so that when new industry standards are being created and implemented, “it’s in a way that makes sense to them and in the way that they operate,” he said.
GFTC has a vision of a “fully traceable food system enabled by digital systems, particularly as it concerns traceability in the seafood industry,” Harris said. In fishery and aquaculture supply chains, the goal of enhanced traceability is to reduce the risk of illegal, unreported, and unregulated seafood, he said.
Supply chain traceability benefits
True end-to-end supply chain visibility can help overcome many hurdles, such as meeting regulatory requirements, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The FDA’s Food Traceability Final Rule establishes traceability recordkeeping requirements for those who manufacture, process, pack, or hold foods included on FSMA’s Food Traceability List (FTL).
While this article does not address FSMA specifically, GS1 has released several resources to assist businesses in meeting FSMA requirements by the Jan. 20, 2026 deadline.
Supply chain visibility also helps get supply chain partners on board to adopt and implement the standards, which is another common hurdle. “Without cooperation, you’re not going to meet any of the challenges. You need to have everybody on the same page,” Harris said.
By working off the same playbook, one person within the business can be the point of contact when suppliers have questions regarding implementation. Ultimately, this streamlines and eases the process for supply chain partners. Otherwise, supply chain partners may have to approach quality assurance, procurement, shipping and receiving, and even the chief sustainability officer, which only causes friction in implementing the standards, Harris added.
Having a common language supports an “implement once, ship anywhere” mentality, Harris said, adding that as suppliers change over time, “they have a starting point for what data they need to bring to the table and how that data is shared.”
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Use cases
November 20 – 21, 2024 Washington, D.C.
Many use cases demonstrate how companies are leveraging artificial intelligence technologies, blockchain, and cloud technology to enhance supply chain visibility and traceability. A few of those uses cases are discussed below.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology: With RFID technology, an “RFID tag” gets affixed to a specific product or pallet, which transmits information to an “RFID reader.” RFID technology allows companies to track inventory more accurately and transparently through the supply chain lifecycle.
RFID technology is more advanced than traditional barcodes because, whereas barcode scanners must read each barcode individually for data to be captured, an RFID reader can scan multiple items at once without a line of sight. In this way, companies in the retail, restaurant, and pharmaceutical industries better track the movement of their products through the supply chain in real time.
Chipotle, for example, became one of the first in the restaurant industry to pilot RFID case labels to track ingredients –such as meat, dairy, and fresh produce – from suppliers to their restaurants. RFID-enabled case labels are scanned by RFID readers, which complement existing scanners in the restaurants. When it first launched the pilot in 2022, Chipotle stated that the benefit of the traceability system was “to act on food safety and quality concerns swiftly, efficiently, and precisely.”
SmartLabel: Smart-label technologies can also help build brand loyalty. SmartLabel, for example, is a digital tool used by 80 companies, representing over 1,000 brands and over 107,000 products in the United States. “It’s how brands communicate with consumers,” explained Rishi Banerjee, head of the SmartLabel program at Consumer Brands Association. A tool that once only provided static product information to consumers now enables companies to share their supply-chain stories with consumers, enhancing supply-chain visibility in the process.
Global consumer products company Unilever, for example, uses SmartLabel to provide consumers with product-label information – such as ingredients and nutrition facts – as well as information about third-party certifications for ingredient standards, product advisories, use instructions, and more.
2D barcodes: Two-dimensional (2D) barcodes are the next generation of barcodes. GS1’s “Sunrise 2027” initiative envisions a future in which QR Codes with GS1 standards (2D barcodes) are widely adopted by the end of 2027. “There is so much more data that can be encoded in the 2D bar code,” said Liz Sertl, senior director of community engagement at GS1 US.
To meet this deadline, retailers’ point-of-sale (POS) systems, and point-of-care systems in the healthcare industry, would need to be equipped with scanners capable of reading both 1D and 2D barcodes; and manufacturers will need to start implementing QR Codes on product packages with GS1 data standards. This major industry shift has already begun, with pilots in 48 countries across all regions, representing 88% of the world’s GDP. “This can be a game-changer because it will streamline so much of that information and data exchange that is already going on now,” Banerjee said.
2D barcodes also will make it easier for companies to communicate directly with store-level associates about which items to pull in the event of a recall. “A lot of times you end up pulling off the shelves more than you need to because there is ambiguity around what you’re supposed to be pulling,” said Doug Baker, vice president of industry relations at the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group for the grocery sector.
“Unlocking all the supply chain data and using it as a force for good is going to be really exciting,” Banerjee said. “It’s going to unlock a lot of new potential use cases, things we haven’t even thought about.”
13th Advanced Forum on Import Compliance & Enforcement
November 20 – 21, 2024 Washington, D.C.
ACI will be holding its “13th Advanced Forum on Import Compliance & Enforcement” on Nov. 20-21 in Washington, DC. For more information, and to register, please visit: https://www.americanconference.com/import-compliance-enforcement/