The Impact Of Product Traceability Within A Business Enterprise

While there are a multitude of IT applications in use at General Mills, this paper will focus on three primary areas: supply chain, data retention and marketing. This will provide a view into how General Mills uses technology to manage their diverse and global supply chain, maintain the integrity of their data and implement successful marketing campaigns. IT plays a critical role in General Mills’ ongoing success.

Technology also helps in the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of product data. For example, in the banking industry several models based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) have been developed to help with the analyzing and processing of data (Yang, 2009). This process not only helps the organization to be more efficient but also more effective when servicing its customers.

This paper is going to give details and insight into each of the three points.

Kudler Foods uses shared databases as a means to increase efficiency and to reduce costs. The use of shared databases creates opportunities for the company to view, manage, and analyze information simultaneously thus providing Kudler with the historical data and forecasting options to consider expanding and increasing profits. Tracking technology, groupware, and workflow software allow Kudler the opportunity to track customer tracking purchase behavior patterns to assist in process refining.

Chipotle’s mission is to change the way people think about fast food, and to deliver “Food with integrity”, which has become the company’s moto. In order to support this commitment, in early 2013, Chipotle started implementing a whole chain traceability and transparency program that is unprecedented in depth and breadth. To mount the ambitious project to achieve whole supply chain traceability, Chipotle is partnering with FoodLogiQ, a GS1 US Solution Partner, offering software solutions that enable companies to proactively track and manage data inside and outside their organizations, leveraging the use of GS1 Standards with its cloud-based approach. This program is going to incorporate several activities which to ensure the relationship with suppliers, and the unaffected flow of food, and raw ingredients. The main objectives of the traceability program are:

The author also mentions how it is almost impossible to manually check every single product as they are being produced. They believe that the problem will be able to solve itself due to the advancing

This large “make to order” manufacturer, offers numerous custom solutions that required myriad parts. With an outdated operations solution and no existing Bill of Materials (BOM) to efficiently plan for parts, many of which were exclusive to each manufacturing

As an introductory point it is important to establish definitions in relation to this question. The background for the review will state the research objectives.

What is the best research method to answer the following questions (items 1 - 8)?

The product line concept seems to be an appropriate choice for DS mostly because of the size of the market it is operating on and its complicated character which also has a reflection in variety of the products DS offers. This approach allows each product line to focus on its own goals, find problems occurring within the product line and undertake steps in order to solve them.

Nice-Pak PDI is a family owned business which is one of the largest wet wipes producer in North America. They are doing manufacturing for contract, private label and branded products. To determine their strongest and weakest territories, products and customers they are gathering sales tracings data from their distributors. At current, sales team collecting their own tracings data and analysis them to see who is their best and worst customers, products and territories. It is really difficult for the sales team to do this analysis as they are doing manually. They spend almost 15%-20% of their time to create their reports and submit to their superior. Here is the main difficulties which sales team are facing currently.

This section presents the related literature and studies after the thorough and in-depth search done by the researcher. This will also present the synthesis of the design, theoretical and conceptual framework to fully understand the research to be done.

It’s the intention of this paper to show at a high level view the management structure used to manage these products, show case areas for improvement and finally suggest ideas in order to improve its effectiveness and efficiencies.

The researcher would like to align with the views of the three authors above by outlining the following research problem.

The aims of this research have been translated into nine research questions which are presented as follows: