Traceability Sourcing The Data — A Critical Challenge

It’s no secret that more and more companies across multiple industries are being challenged by the need to track and completely trace products they produce or materials they handle. Driven by the FDA and regulations such as FSMA (Food safety Modernization Act) and HACCP in the food and beverage industry, hazardous material requirements driven by the EPA and DOT, worker safety driven by OSHA, automotive safety requirements from NHTSA, HIBC for healthcare, etc., organizations are under constant pressure to adapt and keep up. Identifying what data attributes are required to be compliant is tough enough, but added to that challenge is being able to determine where, when and how often the data is collected and how granular it needs to be.

Business solutions, including traceability systems need timely and accurate data to be meaningful and responsive. These solutions utilize modern BI (business intelligence) reporting tools and dashboards to provide a historical view of data and the ability to quickly and perform queries. These tools also help visualize normal day to day operations. More importantly, they help to highlight exception events which trigger immediate notification and predetermined courses of action when exceptions occur. But if the core data is not current, is missing or worse, is in accurate the value of the solution is diminished and non-compliant situations or breaks in the traceability chain can occur.