ABSTRACT

Purpose

The focus of this work-in-progress is to develop a general traceability framework for the textile supply chain. Traceability is of a significant importance for the textile industry, firstly due to multiple actors’ involvement in the production and distribution, and secondly the heterogeneous nature of actors, dealing with diverse materials, including fibre spinning mills, yarn spinning mills, weaving industry and garment manufacturers. Moreover, The textile industry has seen a global shift towards recently industrialized countries; consequently, the offshore buyers have become more dependent on complex supply chains and created more information asymmetry as offshore buyers cannot directly observe the production activities of a distant manufacturer. Resulting consequences of information asymmetry can be seen in terms of counterfeit products, malpractices in production and other social and environmental issues. Moreover, textile market is a volatile market because of rapidly changing trends and consumers’ preferences, therefore inter-actor visibility of production activities is required for synchronous production to meet the market demands. Considering the above-mentioned characteristics and challenges in textile industry, this work targets to develop a traceability framework for improving supply chain visibility and integrate various actors in the textile production supply chain.

Design/methodology/approach

The traceability framework development has been divided into four steps, namely, identification of user requirement of different stakeholders in the textile supply chain, identification of different information points, traceability data modelling, and information exchange model to develop traceability among various stakeholders in the textile production supply chain. In-depth analysis was conducted for the need of traceability from various stakeholders’ perspectives in textile sectors, which include various actors in textile production and distribution, consumers and surveillance/certification authorities. An UML case diagram approach has been followed to define the traceability requirements and UML class diagram approach has been adopted for modelling traceability data.

Findings

The present traceability framework is proposed to handle traceability information and information exchange between various stakeholders in the textile production supply chain, which can not only disseminate the traceability information in the supply chain, but also helpful 704 in case of recall crisis (such as product design fault, harmful chemicals or other related issues) where surveillance authorities can track (forward traceability) and trace (for identifying the source error which resulted recall) the products in the textile supply chain for recalling. Moreover, the traceability information can be used by consumers in order to about the product and raw materials’ history.

Practical implications

Traceability works on the credibility of the organizations, which handle the traceability data. Therefore, in the real implementation, either organizations need to be transparent in terms of traceability data or third party certification/audit is required for ensuring that the traceability information provided by an organization is correct/authentic. Secondly the semantics for information exchange are required to be unified across various actors involved in traceability information storage and exchange.

Original/value

The traceability framework covers perspectives from traceability not only from various actors involved in textile supply chain, but also includes consumers therefore, traceability information is collected by this framework can be utilized from industrial as well as consumer and surveillance perspectives.