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Putting a consumer product out to market in today’s marketplace involves collaboration on a massive scale. From design and sourcing, to production and assembly, and finally to distribution and retailing, the supply chain relies on a highly dispersed global network of business partners that may be better described as a ‘supply web’. With increasingly complex modern manufacturing operations, global businesses demand a higher level of real-time transparency of critical information and processes to ensure product quality and safety, as well as improve yields. The scale and importance of the challenge is reflected in a survey conducted by market researcher IDC entitled "Business Strategy and Supply Chain Innovation". In the survey, 415 manufacturers from a wide range of industries and 179 retailers in the United States what were their top three supply chain initiatives over the next 12 months, product quality was identified as the most important. This may not be surprising given the increase in product recalls in a whole range of industries such as automotive, toys and food. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, consumer-product related incidents, including deaths, injuries and property damage, costed around US$800 billion in the US alone. To meet these challenges, what is required is the recognition that the responsibility for consumer safety needs to be shared by all participants along the supply chain, including suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. RFID technology enables supply chain stakeholders to join hands to improve product quality management within the ecosystem by facilitating end-to-end visibility and traceability along the supply chain. With RFID-enabled processes, supply chain stakeholders can monitor the conditions of the goods-in-transit, and recall products quickly and efficiently if they or any materials used in their production are discovered to be unsafe. In addition, the deployment of RFID-enabled solutions will allow manufacturers to manage operations more efficiently, leading to higher profitability. In Korea, government bodies and major retailers established the Unsafe Products Screening System (UPSS) in cooperation with GS1 Korea to enhance consumer safety. The system uses the GS1 System of standards to effectively and efficiently share information about unsafe products. Under the system, the government bodies sent information about unsafe products to KorEANnet (the GS1-compliant e-Catalog run by GS1 Korea) as soon as they identified a product safety issue. KorEANnet, in turn, relays the information to retailers on a real-time basis to initiate a recall. The system rules out the circulation of unsafe products to consumers at point of sales and cut down the time it took to halt sales of an unsafe product from four hours to just 30 minutes. |
