Glossary of Traceability Terms
Traceability terminology for textile supply chain professionals.
- Batch-level or Lot-level data: Granular information pertaining to a defined quantity of a material or product that is processed together.
- Bill of Material (BOM): This is a list of the raw materials and components, plus the quantities of each, needed to manufacture a product.
- Blockchain: A digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems.
- Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): This is a form of self-regulation that businesses use to instigate philanthropic, activist, or charitable initiatives whereby they engage in or support volunteering practices.
- Certificate of Origin: This is proof that a product was manufactured in a specific country or region, used to comply with due diligence legislation.
- Chain of Custody (CoC): As materials move through the value chain, a Chain of Custody can be created by each handler recording critical information about the lot and its associated claims.
- Circularity: A model of production and consumption that focuses on sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible.
- Compliance: Adhering to requirements that are decreed by laws and regulations.
- Decentralized Data: The process of attaching data to a product, rather than the owner of a product, using blockchain technology.
- Digitization: The process of converting, streamlining and converging analogue information from emails, PDFs and Excel spreadsheets into a digital format on a unified system.
- Due Diligence: The process of auditing your supply chain to identify, mitigate, and account for potential environmental and social issues.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): A software system that allows brands to manage everyday business operations like accounting, supply chain operations, compliance and risk management.
- Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG): A measurement that companies use to evaluate the extent to which their operations impact three core pillars of sustainability.
- Evidence request: The process of contacting suppliers, either digitally or manually, to ask for information about their operations in relation to a specific risk area.
- Fiber Forward Traceability: This refers to the bottom-up process of tracing a product from the raw material phase to the end product in real-time.
- Fragmentation: This refers to data that has been broken up into different formats or across different platforms, leading to inefficiencies and inaccuracies.
- Hard technology: This refers to asset-intensive, physical, science-based technology, including innovations that integrate into existing production systems.
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): A methodology for assessing environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product’s life, from manufacturing to disposal.
- Legislation: Laws and regulations made by a government that businesses must adhere to.
- Material-based claims: This refers to any declaration made by a business relating to the materials used to manufacture their products.
- Product Backward Traceability: Otherwise known as top-down traceability, this refers to the process of tracking the supply chain of a product after it has been manufactured.
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): Organizations use this to develop new products, as well as track and share data along the entire supply chain.
- Purchase Order (PO): This is a document issued by a brand to a supplier which indicates the styles, quantities, and prices for products they have purchased.
- Real-time data: This refers to when information is collected about a material or product, in this case, it is recorded as the item moves through the value chain.
- Scalability: This refers to the ability to expand or increase the implementation of a system or operation to a system-wide level.
- Soft technology: This refers to digital B2C solutions like rental and resale platforms, as well as B2B solutions like traceability software.
- Standardized data: This refers to the process of establishing common identifiers so that multiple systems auditing different or overlapping issues can exchange and collate information.
- Supplier: A supplier is any actor within a supply chain that is involved in the sourcing, manufacturing, or transportation of a material or product.
- Sustainable financing: This refers to the acquisition of financial resources to implement improvements to facilities with a businesses supply chain.
- Third-party audits: This refers to independent groups that perform on-the-ground assessments of facilities to ensure that they’re working in compliance with certifications.
- Tier: Supply chains are commonly divided into tiers where different functions are performed to transform raw material into a finished product.
- Traceability: The ability to trace the history, application, or location of a material or product through recorded identifications.
- Transparency: The relevant information that is available to all elements of the value chain in a standardized way, which allows common understanding, accessibility, clarity and comparison.
- Weight-based calculations: This refers to the measurement of a material or product by its weight in order to determine the content make-up and instances of material wastage.