GS1 has launched a new initiative aimed at increasing safety in the Australian food and beverage supply chain.
An industry working group has
been set up to drive the project, using the GS1 global standards for product identification,
data capture and data sharing.
GS1’s Global Traceability
Standard (GTS) allows businesses to track their products in real-time and have
end-to-end visibility of the supply chain.
Representatives from Nestlé,
Ingham’s, SPC, Lion Dairy and Drinks, Sanitarium, CHR Hansen, Newly Weds Foods,
FPC Food Plastics, Labelmakers, Matthews Australasia and Visy Industries make
up the group.
“The group will work to
achieve consensus across the industry to improve food and beverage safety,
deliver efficiencies and reduce costs,” said GS1 Australian account director
Andrew Steele.
“The project’s objective is
strengthening integration between the thousands of upstream supply chains in
the Australian food and beverage manufacturing industry."
Today, sourcing ingredients
without a traceability and safety protocol invites counterfeit products into
the supply chain and an increased risk of contamination.
News of unsafe or spoilt
products can impact business owner’s livelihoods and the industry’s broader
reputation, along with disruption to consumer’s lives.
The ability for companies to
capture material movements from ‘paddock-to-plate’ provides data integrity and
timeliness from receipt to delivery, with traceability back to the source.
Through automation, many of the manual processes are eliminated and businesses
can be proactive with inventory management and handling systems.
“As a food and beverage
business it’s critical for us from a food safety perspective to be able to
track ingredients all the way back to the origin,” said SPC’s national
logistics manager, Christian Lecompte.
Also critical to business is
the capability to support information and production flow within existing
systems for integrated supply chains. The project has the capacity to eliminate
waste within an organisation’s value stream, reduce non-value-added tasks and
ensure cost-effective solutions for customers, leading to a ‘right-first-time’
approach for all deliveries.
“One of the things we found we
could do to be more efficient was to look at opportunities to be able to
electronically track all the product ingredients throughout the production
cycle – how we identify a product coming into the warehouses, how we receipt
goods, how we put our goods away, how we manage our inventory and how we deal
with our suppliers,” said Lecompte.
The adoption of GS1 standards
as the common language for the identification, data capture and data sharing
will enable automation of key ingredient sourcing, and traceability between
ingredient suppliers and food manufacturers. Using GS1 standards for upstream integration
goes well beyond minimum standards and allows businesses to translate their
internal processes and approaches into the one common language that all trading
partners can use and understand, without having to translate data formats
across different supply chain management systems.
Steele said this is key, as
interoperability is essential to the future of data sharing.
“Establishing international
standards to ensure transparency across the supply chain can help lower
existing barriers to the exchange of data between suppliers, trading partners
and consumers,” he said.
The Supply Chain Improvement
Project has the potential to deliver many benefits to industry, including
increased visibility of food ingredients and raw materials, unique
identification and traceability to improve safety, and reduced costs with
automated business transactions.
Nestle Australia’s head of
digital supply chain, Mandeep Sodhi pointed out the key to the project’s
success.
“By having consensus across
the industry on how to interconnect electronically and exchange critical
operational data, we can realise cost-effective solutions across the end-to-end
– from manufacturers, to suppliers, to customers – everyone benefits from this
improvement in standardisation,” he said.
Looking ahead, the industry
working group is encouraging all upstream businesses to adopt the food and
beverage safety and traceability protocol using GS1 standards.
“With an industry-wide
solution in place, your trading partners will have more visibility of your
products across the supply chain,” said Steele.
GS1 is a valued Corporate Partner of the Drinks Association.