Globalisation, a naturally existing entity of any large business, together with online promotion and sales channels, has bestowed almost unlimited goods access to all markets. Alas, the rise of dishonourable competition requires protection of brand interests and a necessary quality confirmation for the end-consumer. This stemmed an emergence of intercorporate methods of goods security, focusing on falsification control by utilising complex systems that verify each unit.
As a result, international companies face a new challenge - maintaining growth rates and market share together with rapid adaptation and compliance to ever-changing regulations. Today, the successful implementation experience in the pharmaceutical industry is starting to be applied everywhere else, from food supplements to dairy and bottled water. Therefore, the best solution here is to build an advanced network of Track & Trace systems to complement the existing supply chain.
Our cloud-based solution, Utrace Cloud L4, is responsible for serialisation and tracing, and is implemented on the principles of decentralised Track & Trace. Through its development, we analysed the existing approaches and customer experience and concluded that most systems are not ideal as they are built on the basis of a single root processing core and the surrounding service functionality. This approach is typical for enterprises, but comes with expected disadvantages, such as over-complexity due to growth of internal connections and the obligation to consider "neighbouring" functionality, the increased impacts caused by new requirements, and the tedious and expensive regression testing cycle. Consequently, customers are faced with lengthy implementations, a slowdown in the delivery of country-specific functionality, and thus, the risks of regulatory violations.
Utrace develops and deploys microservice architecture, allowing for product unity and uniformity, while keeping operations isolated and logistically reflected in their domestic engines. Accordingly, with a soar of unique international regulations toward a particular product group, the overall complexity of the solution does not increase vertically, and the requirements are exhibited in the horizontal growth of architecture and the emergence of new microservices.
This technology is designed to manage each building block separately, allowing it to be developed speedily and skillfully. Such architecture is also beneficial for the possibility of distributed deployment, enabling certain microservices to be located in both different data centres and host providers. This is apt for countries where encryption algorithms to identify goods and electronic signing regulations of legal documents are in force, which together prohibit the placement of sensitive elements of corporate systems outside the country.