The Market Has Taken Control of the Traceability Timeline – Don’t Fall Behind
The message is clear: the market, not the FDA, is steering the timeline for traceability. Major retailers and wholesalers are already setting their own more aggressive deadlines to implement traceability, and the pace of the market is the new standard. The time to act is now. The FDA’s deadline may be the regulatory benchmark, but it is no longer the driving force behind traceability timelines.
Waiting for the FDA to dictate your timeline to implement a system means falling behind your competitors who are already demanding traceability readiness from their suppliers. The reality is that the market is moving faster than the regulation, and retailers are leading the charge.
You’re Paying the Price for Supplier Mistakes
Let’s be honest, most suppliers have never done traceability before, and they’re not equipped to do it right. When they try, the data they send is full of errors: broken formats, missing fields, mismatched codes. And those errors don’t stay with them; they get injected into your systems. Now it’s your problem. You’re the one stuck with the burden of finding the mistakes, cleaning them up and trying to make it all work with limited staff and shrinking timelines. This mess will cost you time, money and trust.
Still think you have three years to implement traceability? Think again. Your competitors have already announced traceability requirements for foods that go far beyond the FDA’s Food Traceability List – and they’re enforcing them now, across all items.
What’s Your Plan When the Traceability Data Starts Pouring In?
Once you start receiving traceability data, what’s your plan? How will you detect errors? These issues are buried deep in the data, hard to spot and even harder to fix. Without the right tools, they’ll slip through the cracks undetected and wreak havoc on your company.
These are common errors that will derail your company if you’re not ready:
- A mis-keyed identifier for a distribution center, such as typing “DC01” instead of “DC1”
- Data fields that are left empty, partially completed or that contain inaccurate information
- Shipment files that are missing completely
- Inconsistent product names and GTINs
- Mismatched lot codes
- Missing or malformed event timestamps
- Conflicting location identifiers
- Supplier data that doesn’t match your internal records
These errors won’t fix themselves. They’ll flow straight into your systems, break your processes and bury your team in manual cleanup.
What happens when you have dozens or hundreds of customers requiring different data in different formats? What happens when – at the same time – you’re also dealing with the problem of taking in traceability data from suppliers?
You’ll need a way to detect and correct those errors fast, before they hit your systems. And that’s just the beginning. You’ll also have to merge supplier traceability data with your own receiving records, then generate new, accurate shipping traceability files to pass on to your customers.
How will you do all of this yourself?
We Do the Dirty Work So You Don’t Have To
We fix this headache for you. Our scalable, robust system automatically detects and corrects supplier errors before they ever reach you. In addition, ReposiTrak’s U.S.-based Customer Success team conducts outbound calls to your suppliers, helping them identify and correct errors while providing expert guidance to enhance data accuracy and overall performance. We ingest data in any format your suppliers use and instantly validate and standardize it, so you don’t have to. Therefore, the information you receive on your end is accurate and compliant.
We reduce the burden on your team and help suppliers get it right with error-free, consistent and clean data. You shouldn’t have to clean up someone else’s mess, and with the ReposiTrak Traceability Network®, you won’t. We do the heavy lifting for you from start to finish. No more risk of bad data breaking your traceability efforts.
Now is the time to start the conversation about implementing our traceability solution for your company. Please contact ReposiTrak Chief Customer Officer Derek Hannum at dhannum@repositrak.com.
