How do customers and their partners operate with the system

A) SET—UP ACTIVITIES Initially, the customer, i.e. the “director” of the initiative – whether it is an individual company / a consortium / a "vertical" group of members of a given supply chain – defines, with Traceland’s support, how to set-up the initiative. At this stage, through and iterative process that involves the development of one or more configuration prototypes:

• Identifies the content to be published;
• Maps the chain in the application "structural" data section;
• sets the level of detail (granularity, frequency of collection) and each actor’s role in the data collection process.

Accordingly Traceland develops the agreed changes to reporting layout and execute other required technical preparation activities.

Then a small scale pilot data collection activity, involving a limited number of products lots and a limited number of actors can start. Such pilot activity can perhaps be performed manually to ensure actual availability of targeted data and overall feasibility of the process.

Right after that pilot start the reporting channel can be opened with due information about the pilot phase and its implications about coverage and accuracy, possibly accompanied by an explicit request for early comments and contributions by the consumers.

Parallel to this or later on the interfaces to the systems that already hold part of the targeted data can be developed and activated, and the formal validation routines, unless already activated during the pilot to validate manually entered data, have to be up and running.

B) ON GOING ACTIVITIES At full speed, taking as granted the possibility to periodically or occasionally revise structural data and control parameters as due, all actively involved participants – the customer itself and some of its partners - will have to continuously provide the “transactional data” they are responsible for, leveraging as much as possible on automatic interfaces.

Along the time the number and the identity of these directly involved participants could change, with a general tendency to incorporate newer members among those belonging to the supply chain.