Evolution of traceability in industry

"You'd think that since the Perrier "affair" in 1982, which forced the company to destroy 250 million bottles, food companies would have put measures in place to protect them from such disasters". So wrote Henri Hadida in 2006 in his article "Traçabilité en milieu industriel" published by Techniques de l'Ingénieur (TR570). Clearly, this case was not isolated. The author noted that "this textbook case was followed by others: Coca-Cola cans and listeria problems with cheese. It was with the appearance of "mad cow disease" and the fall in beef consumption that traceability became a permanent necessity in the food industry". Admittedly, one might have concluded (hastily) from the analysis of these cases that traceability at the time only concerned large multinationals or companies belonging to the agri-food world. "Henri Hadida added that "the numerous crises involving various small and medium-sized businesses have led to a demand at European level and a growing awareness on the part of company directors".

In fact, traceability concerns all industries and services, while the material and IT resources made available to them are now multiplying rapidly with new information and communication technologies, the smartphone as powerful as a computer, connected objects, speech recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, virtual reality and all the future technologies that are still unknown to us... An example of this lightning evolution: In 2016, we learned that big data had been integrated by the software publisher JDA Software into its transport management system to provide carriers with much greater real-time visibility over their entire supply chain. "With the massive development of big data and connected objects, there's an abundance of data available. Add to this the fact that the supply chain is undergoing unprecedented change and is becoming more complex by the day, and the notion of visibility on a recurring event is insufficient", explained Fabrizio Brasca, VP Solution Strategy, Intelligent Fulfillment at JDA.

Clearly, current technological developments necessitated an overhaul of the 2006 article, which led Techniques de l'Ingénieur to publish two new articles:

• TR 571: the evolution of traceability in industrial environments ;

• TR 572: traceability in industrial environments.