Product Traceability: transparent from seed to bag
Farms or nurseries that scale up production or increase their position in the value chain run the risk of losing the overview. Larger harvests mean more administration and a more complex business process increases the chance of transfer errors. The solution to this is a Product Traceability platform.
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What does Product Traceability mean?
A Product Traceability platform is software that provides insight into your product's entire journey. This way, everyone has all the necessary information in one overview at every stage. For example, you can see at a glance which seeds have been used in which plot or which crops come from which farmer. In this way, the journey from cultivation to transport becomes easy to monitor.
Benefits
- Easy monitoring
The biggest advantage is that you, as management, can easily monitor production. You get real-time information on the progress and therefore never have to wait for confirmation of certain deliveries or actions. - Clear handover
If several processes are carried out in-house, there will often also be a transfer. It is important that all relevant information travels with the product. In this way, all persons involved are aware of the pre- and post-process of the batch in question. - Less error prone
Working with paper order lists or product overviews can still sometimes go wrong. By having everything available digitally and linking it to a batch, you minimise the number of errors. - Damage limitation
If something goes wrong in the process, it is immediately possible to trace which product batch is involved. This means that in the event of a failed harvest or a packaging error, only the products affected need to be recalled, rather than the entire harvest or order. - Optimisation
More insight makes it possible to optimise the harvest. By tracing back which plots yield the most, cultivation can be made more effective.
Tips
If you are planning to set up a Product Traceability platform, we have the following tips:
- Take exceptions into account.
Many companies initially assume the normal course of events. Yet not everything always runs according to the textbook everywhere, and there are always exceptions in the process. To fully incorporate everything into the software, it is important that these exceptions are given space in the application. For this, UX Research is essential. A UX Designer walks along on the shop floor and designs working methods for all deviating scenarios.
- Make data processing low-threshold.
If everything has to be entered manually, there is a chance that the process will actually become more labour-intensive and more error-prone. It is therefore important to keep data processing as simple as possible. Think, for example, of camera use and applications such as QR codes and Machine Learning.
- Make sure everything is available everywhere.
It is also important to consider the context of use. Different locations and situations require different user requirements. For example, a PC or server may not be used in the field. To ensure that everything is available everywhere, the platform must be available via the cloud and be suitable for multiple devices and platforms. Cloud services and cross-platform frameworks such as Ionic offer the solution here.
