Supply Chain Traceability: let’s work out what it’s for

Supply Chain Traceability is a hot topic. It seems like every day a new blockchain-enabled, internet of things, big data solution pops up. In this brief blog post, I advocate a different way of looking at supply chain traceability that starts with problems and goals, rather than solutions and technologies.

This blog post is based on a recent conference paper I wrote with Prof. Ala Arvidsson that was presented at IPSERA21.

A good product designer starts with a simple set of requirements that are created from the needs of imagined users. Maybe the product needs to be a certain size, be compatible with related products, etc. Yet, when supply chain traceability systems are developed, the design process often starts with a set of technologies that are reverse engineered onto the supply chain. This is like buying a van without working out if it has enough capacity for the products being shipped.

Jumping to technologies and solutions is creating two problems. First, supply chain traceability is seeing a return on investment crisis, with some firms abandoning their efforts completely. We saw this first hand with one of the firms we worked with for our paper. Second, focal firms are struggling to integrate their nth-tier suppliers into these systems. Motivation is low when farms and fisheries don’t understand the goals of the system.

We argue that any supply chain traceability system has only 5 features, as I describe below. Before you invest a penny in hardware or software, you must understand what you need in terms of these features. This is design science for supply chain traceability systems.

Any manager with a good understanding of their supply chain, their consumers, and the regulators in their market should be able to describe what they need from traceability in terms of: depth, breadth, speed, precision, and access.

Depth - How far the traceability system extends forwards and backwards in the supply chain and the lifecycle of the product. A deep system extends from raw materials to end of life, a shallow system may only cover factory to retail.

Breadth - How many different ‘data points’ a supply chain traceability system collects about a given product and the processes it undergoes. A broad system may collection 100,000s of data points over the product’s life.

Precision - The smallest size of product unit identified by the supply chain traceability system. Products may be identified at the item or batch level, or even larger.

Speed - The time lag between products being exchanged between parties in the supply chain and the traceability information for those products being shared. The fastest systems move products and information simultaneously, is the cost of this required in your case?

Access - The number of different parties with full or partial access to product and process data from the supply chain traceability system. Who needs access? A high access system may provide regulators and consumers with partial access to the system.

This all leads to the simple question - what does your ideal traceability system look like?

Technologies can then be matched to the required levels of depth, breadth, speed, precision, and access.