Product Traceability
Track and Trace Made Easy
Integrating the correct marking technology into a track and trace solution doesn’t have to be complicated or cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our solutions help you easily enable consumer validation, providing brand verification and comprehensive brand management of serialized products through a broad range of smart consumer and industrial technologies. Matthews’ MPERIA® solutions are serialization-ready, simplifying integration and generating product IDs and storage for identification at manufacturing, transport, distribution, and retail locations.
What is traceability?
Traceability means being able to determine who created, stored, tested, transported, consumed, or disposed of a product or merchandise, when and with what aids – at any point in time. With the help of an identification system, your products are made traceable with clearly marked with barcodes, datamatrix codes, time and date information, lot codes or batch numbers.
What is upstream tracing?
Upstream tracing focuses on the traceability of goods from the consumer back to the producer. For example, in the food sector, customers can use origin labels to trace where their food comes from.
What is downstream tracing?
Downstream tracing enables you as a producer to trace the complete usage history of the goods you produce back to the consumer. In the event of a defective product, the materials, tools, and work steps used can be checked and affected products can be recalled quickly and transparently.
Why is traceability important?
A traceability initiative offers more than meeting regulatory requirements, your business benefits in multiple ways. For example, moving from manual manufacturing processes to automated, digitized operations can streamline your entire manufacturing process. Establishing traceability can simplify quality controls within manufacturing and make them more traceable. Quality controls during the manufacturing process include initial inspection of raw materials at receiving, inspection after certain production steps, and finally a quality check before goods leave your facility. You can digitally archive each of these inspection records and measured values, assign them to your goods with the help of a unique identifier, and retrieve as needed. A functioning traceability process ensures your company can quickly and efficiently identify affected products or batches in the event of a recall. Likewise, impacted customers can quickly and transparently be informed.
Traceability Solutions
Marking and coding automation platform centralizing control of your marking and coding, regardless of equipment technology or vendor.
A cost-effective alternative to adhesive labels and pre-printed corrugated boxes and cartons.
Thermal inkjet coding of variable data, text and graphics at unprecedented speeds.
How does traceability work in reality?
The two main components to enable traceability:
- A reliable marking or labeling solution
- Central storage and management of data
Initial stages of a traceability program involve your company determining a suitable method for marking goods. This could be barcodes or data matrix / 2D codes. Various marking methods are available, such as direct printing or labeling. Selecting an identification system needs to be tailored to the requirements of your production operation and any packaging.
Once an identifier has been applied, your product can be recorded by scanners or cameras before each production stage. Steps performed or additional materials used are documented in real time in a central database. Once your product has gone through the entire manufacturing process and all data is documented, it is considered fully traceable.
Benefits of traceability.
Products can be monitored throughout the manufacturing process across multiple production facilities, regardless of geographic location. This is true global visibility in your production process.
We offer the right solution for your production process; whether you need traceability codes marked in ink or applied with a labeling system. We have you covered from product to pallet, including our MPERIA A-Series for palletized labeling.
Our MPERIA platform maintains visibility of coding and marking errors by reporting issues such as unreadable or missing codes. These real-time alarms enable you to react immediately, eliminate the source of the error, and minimize downtime as well as the number of affected products.
We have experience across all segments, including harsh industrial environments. Contact us for a site inspection.