When one thinks of traceability, the first thing that comes to mind is often produce traceability. However, traceability isn’t just for the produce and agriculture industries – it can be implemented into many other fields including electronics, meat & dairy, toys and so much more.
There are a number of reasons to implement traceability and transparency in your business and your product lines regardless of industry or product type. Here are just a few.
1. Customer Trust and Loyalty – Traceability and transparency are important steps to take to gain the trust of consumers. They are effective ways to communicate safety and quality to the consumer, and as a result, traceability has been increasingly demanded for by consumers.
The greatest way to gain new customers and retain your current customer base is by gaining their trust; the simplest way to gain a customer’s trust is transparency (honesty). 2. Protect the Innocent – When problems occur and recalls become necessary, businesses suffer. By implementing traceability, those that are unaffected can continue to sell their products. Traceability expedites the problem-solving process involved in contamination cases and allows issues to be quickly contained and resolved with minimal collateral damage. With traceability, product categories are able to maintain their availability rather than being completely destroyed. Traceability allows businesses to show customers that their products are unaffected and safe.
3. Improve business – In a survey by Yottamark, 85% of consumers stated that they prefer to purchase traceable food over non-traceable. In conclusion, if you products are up against traceable competitive products, you may lose out on business.
4. Protect public health and safety.
5. Vendors that offer traceability have a significant advantage over those who do not. Many fast food chains, superstores, restaurants, et al. require traceability from vendors as the result of perceived risk. Therefore, vendors that offer traceability are more likely to win business than those who do not.
6. Real-time traceability quickly pays for itself. Demonstrating compliance and real-time traceability can expand a company’s customer base and enables the company to go completely paperless seamlessly. By eliminating a timely and costly paper-based system, productivity and efficiency increase through decreased labor requirements, improved inventory control and many other benefits. In the case of a contamination incident, traceability lowers the cost of containing and resolving the issue.
