Traceability, as well as being a legal requirement in certain sectors, is a valuable support for companies operating in the manufacturing sector as it enables them to manage efficiently and transparent the entire production chain.

Usually the term tracking and tracing are used interchangeably, but in fact they refer to two different and complementary processes. In fact tracking is the ability to describe the path of a raw material or a lot of production within the production chain by acquiring information at each step made. Tracing instead is the ability to reconstruct back the entire history of a product: from its final state until the raw materials used.

The first trial, in practice, it can identify operational structures involved, activities, treatments and steps that need to be documented in order to monitor the progress of the product; the second one allows, for each finished product, to identify the responsibilities of all those involved in the supply chain tracing back the recorded history.
A careful policy of tracking and tracing of all resources in the company (raw materials, finished products, equipment, machines...) allows enterprises to support production rates imposed by the market giving customers high quality standards.
Companies therefore require a traceability system capable of:

• recording incoming raw materials by associating each of them an identification code (ID batch)which date back quickly when they occur non-conformities;
• monitoring the processes of transformation of raw materials in order to know the progress of production and identify any anomalies in the process;
• controlling the quality of semi-finished output. In this case, the system imports the data relating to the control method adopted, control tools and dates during which such procedures have been carried out in order to ensure the backward path (traceability) and the possibility of identifying the cause of a non-compliance.