Track and Tracing - Beyond The Power of Individual Players
By: Hans Bool
You hear often people say, “we don’t like rules, laws and regulations and all that. We can handle quality and please don’t tell us what to do.” Reality is that more and more, a single business is connected not only to the internet, but also chained to other players in the economic game and in some business areas this game changed over time.
One area in which a law altered the rules quite a bit is the Food business. The General Food Law (GFL) that entered in force in (January) 2005 (in Europe) triggered a big change.Probably the real trigger is to be searched among the incidents we all know about; The mad cow disease, bird flu and other threats that are evolving rapidly.
And our health is at stake.
Without international governance individual companies wouldn’t be able to handle this issue. This is because of the individual producers, distributors, market organizations, retailers and consumers are not capable of managing an overall infrastructural requirement which is: safety (and security).
Any company focuses on its primary business process. Infrastructure is supporting this primary process with some requirements that do not directly contribute to the main flow. Safety is one of such a requirement, security is another and business continuity only a third of many more of such requirements.
The problem with this single player in the food arena is that when one such a quality requirement is not met, other players get involved – a real influenza. Your package with tomatoes gets mixed on a pallet and both end at the supermarket.
Now, which one is infected? One individual player is never able to lift the overall quality of the food chain in which many other players interfere. So in this case we need a government setting the right rule.
This - tracking and tracing rule - improves the quality of the food chain, but also triggers the business to be more innovative…
© 2006 Hans Bool
Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days.
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