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A TRACE OF COMMON SENSE In the middle of a pandemic, product traceability is arguably more important than ever. By Peter Howard. SUPPLY CHAIN & LOGISTICS Fish out of water I’ve never been a fan of jigsaws. As a keen wildlife photographer, I avoid them by claiming a preference for intact images, but the truth is they frustrate me more than anything I’ve ever known. On my 21st birthday, a friend gave me a 3,000-piece puzzle and challenged me to complete it within seven days. Success meant he would buy my ticket to a forthcoming Pink Floyd concert, and failure meant I’d buy his. I should have known better, but the puzzle’s image of an eagle snatching a confused looking salmon from a lake, was enough to lure me in. The deal was on. That evening, when I opened the box and read the manufacturer’s note, I knew I was in trouble. “This jigsaw is designed to be challenging,” it said. “There are no straight-edged border pieces, and to make things fun we’ve included 50 pieces that don’t belong.” After then reading that every piece was double sided but only one side related to the image, I realised how that salmon must have felt. I closed the box and called my friend, but his delighted laughter told me everything I needed to know. I’d been completely set up – and the tickets were far from cheap. An emerging puzzle Tracking the journey of products in a supply chain is the commercial world’s version of a jigsaw. There are thousands of pieces of information, all meaningless in isolation, but when linked to related pieces of information, they begin to form a picture. Like my jigsaw, supply chains contain incompatible pieces of information, but with no picture on a box to guide the process, making sense of those pieces can be impossible. It’s as though somebody took multiple jigsaws, each build using a different format, then mixed them in a single box from TO PAGE 58 OCT, 2020 RETAIL WORLD 57