Traceability allows us to follow the step by step of a product, from its emergence to its current location.
Traceability is a term that was recently incorporated into the twenty-third edition of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) . For the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) , traceability is the property of the result of a standard value, which can be linked to specific references through a continuous series of comparisons.
In other words, traceability is made up of predetermined processes that are carried out to determine the various steps that a product goes through, from its birth to its current location in the supply chain.
Specifically, when studying and establishing the traceability of a product, it is essential to identify three basic aspects of it, such as the origin of its various components, the set of processes that have been applied to the aforementioned and also both the distribution and the location of the product in question after its delivery has been undertaken.
Types of traceability
It is possible to distinguish between two types of traceability when seeking to know the status of a product that circulates within a logistics chain. Internal traceability acts on a company 's internal procedures and takes into account the composition of the product, its handling, the machines used and other factors. External traceability , for its part, adds other elements to externalize the information that arises from internal traceability.
Traceability, in short, is based on the registration of the traces that a product leaves while it travels through the chain before reaching the final consumer. We are currently working to develop a standard format that allows traceability to be shared and disseminated in a simple way.
The intention is to develop the ability to review the trajectory and path followed by each product, something that would allow us to know where its components come from, what treatments are applied to it and how distribution is carried out. This would, in turn, make it possible to improve the quality of the product and increase the value for the final consumer.
Traceability requires recording information from different processes and stages.
Bar-code
In this sense, it is essential that we make known the existence of an element that is very useful and practical when establishing the traceability of a product in question. This is the case of the well-known barcode . The aforementioned is apparently a set of straight, vertical and parallel lines that represent certain information about that product, which allows it to be classified and which also incorporates a series of numbers that also give data about it.
All this information provided, through the lines and numbers, is encoded, which makes the existence of a device, known as a reader or receiver, necessary and vital, which is responsible for decoding it and offering the data referring to the product.
In this way we can establish that we find technological devices of this type in many places that have become common settings in our routine such as supermarkets or ATMs. In the case of the first, what they do is read the codes that appear on various types of food products and in the second, they proceed to decode the codes on credit cards or bank accounts.
Technology , with the combination of communication networks, the Web, wireless connectivity, satellite tracking and specialized computer programs, contributes to improving traceability.