Trade, today, poses many challenges to retailers. Considering the large volumes of goods that they deal with, product authentication across the supply chain is a significant challenge for retailers and e-tailers. Supply chain efficiency is defined by real-time product visibility in the supply chain of product movements. Considering that trade today transcends national boundaries, they also need universally unique identification of products.
GTIN
One such solution is the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), the most commonly used GS1 identification key. Used to uniquely identify products, the GTIN has relevance at all stages of the supply chain, including primary packaging (consumer unit), secondary (inner packing), and tertiary (carton/pallet), and more. Once a GTIN number has been delegated to a trade item by a business, it is permanently affixed to it across the globe, for all the business entities and trading partners, globally. This enables them to have a consistent identity in communicating information about the product worldwide.
GTIN is encoded in a barcode or an EPC/RFID tag; upon scanning it, professionals in the supply chain can efficiently and accurately process products and related information. It could be a sales employee at a billing counter in a store, a warehouse worker, or even someone administering the product in a hospital.
GTIN: An effective solution for your business woes
GTINs are foundational to achieve greater visibility of products, product traceability and transparency across the supply chain.
By embedding traceability across the supply chain, businesses can instantly know where their products are (in which stage of production as well as their geographical location). They can also effectively issue product recalls of harmful products and to communicate salient features (e.g. allergens, production methodology, etc.). For supply chain managers, traceability enables improvement in stock management and return flows, better expiry date and waste management, and better Product Life Cycle management.
GS1 GTIN also enables faster product listing on e-tailing platforms, i.e., easy selling through retailers. By using GS1’s GTINs, brand owners also get free access to GS1’s DataKart service, which helps them in sharing product information and product changes with retailers and e-tailers in real time . DataKart also populates product information in the Smart Consumer App to make it accessible to consumers.
Further, Google studies have shown that compliance with GTINs enhances online search results for a product by 40%.
Reaching out to customers with accurate product information has never been more competitive and difficult for retailers than today. This is majorly because of the ever increasing complexity of business processes with ever increasing consumer demands of more and more product information. As we move from single-channel retailing to multi-channel retailing, the need for better and efficient product data management has become critical. Listing new products as soon they are launched in the market is critical to ensure that they consumers don’t go back without making sales. This is directly proportional to a retailers/e-tailers’ ability to quickly receive and update information on new products from several suppliers and present it to retail shoppers as per the requirement of the retailing channel, ensuring seamless shopping experience. However, in the real world scenario, most of this product information is compromised (and lost to some extent) in the process of receiving the sam...
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