Fundamentals:Traceability definition
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International Organization of Standardization (ISO)
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 Union
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.
Codex Alimentarius
Traceability/product tracing is the ability to follow the movement of food through specified stage(s) of production, processing and distribution.
Traceability categories
Traceability can be distinguished into two categories even though both categories are interrelated:
Basically, internal traceability enables chain traceability.
