Fundamentals:Traceability definition

From TraceFood

A practical and often used definition of traceability is found in ‘ISO 8402:1994 Quality management and quality assurance - Vocabulary’ where traceability is defined as:

The ability to trace the history, application or location of an entity by means of recorded identifications.

The newer ‘ISO 9000:2000 Quality Management Systems. Fundamentals and Vocabulary’ has a slightly less specific definition of traceability:

The ability to trace the history, application or location of that which is under consideration.

For both these definitions, there is an additional clause which states that when relating to products, traceability specifically entails ‘the origin of materials and parts, the processing history, and the distribution and location of the product after delivery.’

Note that in the 2000 definition ‘recorded identifications’ are no longer mentioned, which means that, according to ISO 8402, objective methods or instruments which give immediate values for entity properties (for food items, for instance devices that measure fat, water content, colour, salinity, etc.) do not provide traceability, where as according to ISO 9000 they do. For the food industry, the older and more specific definition is the most applicable, and the objective methods and instruments are considered to provide traceability control mechanisms rather than traceability as such, and they are used to verify the claims made in the recorded identifications.

European Community Regulation 178/2002 ‘General principles and requirements of food law’ of 28 January 2002, and in force from 1 January 2005 defines traceability as:

The ability to trace and follow a food, feed, food-producing animal or substance intended to be, or expected to be incorporated into a food or feed, through all stages of production, processing and distribution.

This definition is very specific with respect to what should be ‘traced and followed’, but it suffers from the same major weakness as the two ISO definitions; to define traceability all three clauses use the closely related word ‘trace’, and what meaning the word ‘trace’ has is less than clear, and not defined by ISO or European Commission. In many contexts, ‘trace’ is used interchangeably with ‘track’ or ‘follow’, but some organisations (notably GS1) explicitly define ‘trace’ as the capability to identify origin and ingredients (moving upstream, to previous links and processes) where as ‘track’ denotes the capability to identify distribution and location (moving downstream, to subsequent links and processes). Although the ambiguity and lack of definition relating to the word ‘trace’ is a significant weakness in all these definitions, the concept is clear: Each link records what it is doing, relates it to ‘that which is under consideration’, and provides a mechanism for getting access to these recordings later on.

This means that there are two types of traceability:

1. Internal traceability, data relating to your own production or process. Internal traceability typically has the following characteristics:

• It is within one company
• It is in one geographical location
• It gets a lot of the information from the production management systems
• There are few privacy issues
• It is simpler to do, and some companies have good systems already

Many companies have good routines and software systems for keeping track of internal traceability. This kind of software is often linked with dedicated production management software and general Enterprise resource planning (ERP)-systems.

2. Chain traceability deals with the data you receive and the data you send. Chain traceability typically has the following characteristics:

• It occurs between companies and between countries
• It depends on internal traceability being present
• There are major privacy issues
• Standards for recording and exchange of data are needed

The enforcement of chain traceability implies the development of systems providing information on the entire life cycle of food products, "from the farm - or the sea - to the fork", or indeed the other way round. A company located in one specific link of a supply chain may very well have completely manual systems for record keeping of traceability information. However, electronic solutions facilitate business partners to reconstruct the complete process history of any food efficiently and quickly. Software houses now offer sophisticated traceability systems that give you access to all aspects of a food's provenance at any time and from any level of the food chain.