Product traceability

Product traceability in supply chain management is the ability to track and document the journey of products and their components from raw materials to finished goods. Effective traceability enables organizations to verify product authenticity, measure contractual obligations, facilitate quality control, manage recalls efficiently, and maintain regulatory compliance while providing transparency to stakeholders.

Product traceability addresses the critical need for visibility and validation of each party supporting a particular product's supply chain. Tracing products back up the supply chain involves frequent updates as there are changes in vendors, suppliers, warehouses, manufacturing, and carriers. Begin with AWS Glue, for seamless ingestion, cleaning, and processing of third-party data, particularly focused on vital information such as shipping and invoice details. A user-friendly, serverless portal, powered by Amazon Route 53, Amazon Cognito, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon S3, enables stakeholders to upload supply chain certificates effortlessly.

The pivotal feature of this architecture lies in its meticulous data extraction process initiated by Amazon EventBridge and orchestrated by AWS Step Functions. Here, Amazon Textract's capabilities, including optical character recognition and plain language queries, facilitate the extraction of key details from certificates, such as expiration dates and certificate numbers. The inclusion of Amazon Location Service further enhances traceability by mapping supplier addresses to GPS coordinates, offering a visual representation of geographical locations. Notably, the system allows for optional crosschecking of the extracted data against third-party information, providing a validation mechanism crucial for the authenticity and accuracy of product traceability data.

Product traceability from AWS Professional Services is specifically tailored to meet the demands of global enterprises, offering a seamless, automated, and secure solution. Through a combination of data extraction, mapping, and validation processes, it provides organizations with a comprehensive toolset to achieve real-time visibility and accuracy in tracing activities throughout the supply chain.

Reference architecture

Architecture description

1. Data is stored in Amazon S3 for processing into Amazon Redshift for the data lake.

2. Processing through Amazon SageMaker AI ML models and AI services

3. Real-time analysis and prediction

4. API-based service delivery

5. Continuous monitoring and optimization

Architecture objectives

• Scalable processing of supply chain data

• Automated document processing

• Real-time insights and predictions for end-to-end supply chain

• Audit compliance and secure data interchange

• Integration with existing systems, internal and external

• Monitoring and optimization capabilities

Metrics

Based on the product traceability scenario, the three relevant metrics are:

• Data accuracy and validation:

  • Primary metric: Accuracy rate of extracted and validated product data

  • Supporting metrics:

    • Document extraction success rate

    • Data validation match rate

    • Certificate verification accuracy

    • Error detection rate in supply chain documentation

    • Relevance: Critical for reliable traceability and compliance verification

• Traceability response time

  • Primary metric: Time to trace a product's complete supply chain journey

  • Supporting metrics:

    • Data retrieval speed

    • Certificate processing time

    • Query response time for product history

    • Time to generate traceability reports

    • Relevance: Essential for rapid response to quality issues or recalls

1. Data integration completeness:

   • Primary metric: Percentage of supply chain events successfully captured and linked

   • Supporting metrics:

     • Supply chain visibility coverage

     • Partner data integration rate

     • Documentation completeness score

     • Chain of custody gaps identified

     • Relevance: Measures the effectiveness of end-to-end traceability

These metrics were selected because they:

• Focus on core traceability requirements

• Address key compliance and quality control needs

• Measure system effectiveness in maintaining complete chain of custody

• Align with regulatory and stakeholder requirements

• Support rapid response capabilities for quality issues or recalls