Total traceability system: A sustainable approach for food traceability in SMEs

Traceability systems have become a dominant management information system within the production and marketing companies as they can efficiently control the supply chain, by minimizing the risks of the production process, and helping to enhance the consumer/customer reliability on products. There may have some limitations of using available traceability systems with small and medium scale industries as there may have design-reality gap of such systems. In this paper, we first analyzed effectiveness, limitations and practical problems of the available traceability systems for supply chain management. Design gap between real system and proposed model, high cost, accuracy and lack of technically qualified staff are some main problems of such systems. Then we introduced a novel system, "Total Traceability System", to overcome such limitations and problems by minimizing the gap between design and on-the ground reality (minimize the design reality gap). Further, we are going to implement our system with a sales and marketing company business model. Our system mainly addresses the cost effectiveness, accuracy, user friendliness, preciseness and security. Furthermore, we have planned to implement this system in three phases.