FEATURE Sustainability
Driving sustainability through a single code
Ken Sickles, EVP, Chief Product Officer for Digimarc, looks at how the use of product digital identities will contribute to a more sustainable future
A
fter decades of excessive consumerism, society is fi nally waking up to the fact that our planet has limited resources.
A growing focus on health, inclusivity and sustainability means that consumers today are demanding increasing amounts of information about products: they want to know if those items that they are buying and using are produced in a safe and sustainable manner.
It’s been long known that brand integrity, or how consumers perceive a company and its products, image and reputation, can make or break a brand. Today’s consumers want to see proof that the brands they support with their pocketbooks live up to their core values and mission statements. It is no longer enough to simply state that a product is fairtrade/organic/non-GMO. They want evidence that a brand is treating its workers fairly and behaving in an ethical and safe manner – and this expectation extends across the whole of the supply chain. Paying lip service to promises of sustainability and ethical behaviour just isn’t an option. Coupled with growing Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) compliance and regulatory requirements, never has there been a greater need for end-to-end traceability of individual product items, and with the technology now readily available to facilitate this at scale, there is no excuse for businesses not to provide it.
Transparency time Over four-trillion consumer products are made, shipped and retailed globally every year. Yet end-to-end traceability of each item through its lifecycle journey is, for the vast majority of goods, a black hole of insight, leaving the supply chain vulnerable to disruptions.
For decades businesses have focused on minimising costs, reducing inventories
36 June 2022 | Automation
[Image: Harry Cunningham for Unsplash]
and driving up asset utilisation. However, a Ernst & Young survey conducted in late 2020 found that in the wake of the pandemic many businesses were planning to “shake up their supply chain strategies to become more resilient, collaborative and networked with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders”. Enhanced transparency across the supply chain will continue to be integral to increasing resilience and agility. So far, gaining this full visibility
across the whole supply chain has been diffi cult, with data being disparate and inconsistent across suppliers. But societal, economic and legislative pressures have put pressure on this area to mature, and the industry has met this challenge through innovations around data capture, collaboration around open data standards and product digitisation. Now, with the ability to automatically print unique digital identities onto individual goods at a scaleable cost, combined with the computing power to share, process and store the massive amount of item-level product data in the product cloud, true end-to-end visibility is achievable and benefi ting brands and consumers in the market today.
For example, packaging leaders like
Sealed Air have embraced digitisation as a business strategy. Prismiq, launched in April, combines smart packaging and digital printing to give every product package a serialised digital identity to collect and manage value chain data in the
product cloud. Sealed Air partners with Digimarc to provide the serialised digital identities and product cloud for Prismiq. Product digitisation with a unique digital identity means an item can be automatically tracked along its production journey, with businesses being confi dent that their products produced in a sustainable and ethical manner. This ability to access all the information around a product’s life-cycle by simply scanning a code will provide businesses with both the challenge and opportunity of fi nally being able to meet customer expectations of transparency. Consumers will expect it, and it will be up to consumer brands to ensure they deliver it – or risk losing market share to those that do.
In addition to businesses themselves investing in digital identity technologies, the more the industry collaborates and works together to embed the new norms, the more rapidly businesses will start to reap the benefi ts. As with the implementation of any new technology, there will be an initial outlay, but the result of taking an approach of continuous improvement and innovation will help to protect businesses from supply chain and reputation risks, build brand integrity and contribute to a more sustainable future.
CONTACT:
Digimarc
www.digimarc.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
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