Trace It!

Every day we consume products and services. But have you ever stopped to think about the path they went to get to you?

Every product has its history. Who produced it? How was it produced? Under what working conditions? What kind of impact does it have?

Fortunately, today, more and more consumers of products and services seek to know the origin of the assets they consume.

According to the article New Sustainability, by JWT Intelligence, 83% of consumers would always pick the brand which had a better record of sustainability and 70% would be willing to pay more for products and services if they protect the environment or don’t infringe on human rights.

On the other hand, businesses and governments face a lot of inefficiencies in the value chains: they are highly vertical and informal, the auditability is compromised, there is the obscurity of provenance and its negative impacts.

Let's check some data about it:

• 47% of Brazilian business declared that had too many or too few products on the shelves. — FecomercioSP 2018
• $ 60 billion / year represents the costs of inefficiencies between producers and suppliers, in the global food chain. — IBM Food Trust
• More than 1/3 of global companies operate more than 10 supply chains and nearly 70% are looking for ways to standardize these supply chains to reduce costs and streamline operations. — Penske Logistics and the Council for Supply Chain Management Professionals’ annual State of Logistics Report
• “Most of the organizations I work with don’t have the processes to collect the data they need, or they don’t have the analytics to analyze the data.” — Jason Miller, professor of logistics at Michigan State University.

We can clearly see that the challenge is two-fold. On the consumer side, there is an increase of consciousness and increasing demand for transparency. And on the business side, there is a need for traceability and a desire to make operations more efficient and do away with legal complications, such as corruption and counterfeit products.

But first, what is the difference between traceability and transparency?

Traceability is the quality of being able to find and follow the origin and the course of development of an asset. We are talking about the possibility of tracking granular transactions of all levels in a chain, forward and backward. That means the process is known from end to end.

Transparency encompasses different levels of visibility. Such visibility may or may not be available for consumers. At the internal level, transparency concerns specific information in value chains, such as people involved, locations, and compliance requirements. At the external level, transparency concerns mostly the consumers, allowing them to know the origin and the impact of the service or product in question.

In a complementary and non-exclusive way, while traceability aims to understand the details of operations (time, parties involved, place, price, quality), transparency aims to show the social, environmental, and economic impact of this information at each stage of the process.

How can we improve the efficiency of the chains and guarantee consumers the quality and impact of what they consume?

Blockchain as a tool to bring traceability and transparency. Read more about it here: https://medium.com/@blockforce.in/class-of-solution-efficiency-pay-117d3fd5fe47

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