Product traceability in manufacturing: A technical review
Reuben Schuitemaker, Xun Xu
Abstract
Alongside other Industry 4.0 practices, modern product traceability provides a valuable digital mechanism for a thorough understanding of the process, absolute control of quality, effective management and debugging of complaints, damaged products, inefficiencies in production and distribution of responsibilities. This review looks at framework designs, enabling technologies and implementation processes for product traceability systems in manufacturing. Commonalities between traceability systems in both design and implementation were found when looking at a fundamental level, but largely varied at a detailed level. Product traceability systems tend to be interwoven into many layers of a manufacturing execution system, both at a physical and digital level, making implementation a complicated task.