Comment: Total recall with Task management
Modern technology solutions can help retailers and suppliers quickly manage product recalls and protect consumers.
By OP Choudhary
The recent news on the outbreak of the foodborne illness E. coli across Europe highlights the need for retailers and their suppliers to have the ability to rapidly and effectively deal with potentially harmful products that reach consumers, especially in the food industry.
In the case of recalls, all types of retailers should have the capability to quickly pull dangerous products from their shelves, in all stores. But this is particularly important in the grocery industry, where most products are edible and are usually consumed shortly after they are purchased.
Unfortunately, the inefficient tools that many retail chains use today to manage a product recall put the health and safety of consumers at risk. Many retailers still rely on e-mail and old-fashioned phone calls to notify their stores about product recalls. Management at headquarters often have to send out a barrage of e-mails and alerts to ensure someone at each store has received the notice and had the product in question removed from the supply chain. In the case that a retailer is unable to confirm that specific stores have withdrawn the product, the retailer has to send follow-up communication.
With all these e-mails and phone calls going back and forth, it can take days or even weeks for a retail chain to complete a product recall. These delays, and the resulting risks to consumers, are, however, avoidable. Numerous retailers of all types – home improvement, toys, grocery, apparel and more – have reduced the time it takes to successfully complete a product recall in all stores from weeks to hours after implementing a task management solution.
A task management solution enables a retailer to send a prioritised recall notice to all stores, with all the information store managers need to know about the recall attached with the notification, along with signage to be displayed. With task management, as each store checks off the product recall as ‘done’, headquarters can monitor completion statuses in real time. This allows them to manage by exception and focus their attention on stores that have not yet completed the recall, instead of wasting time communicating with the stores that have already complied.If the task management solution is role-based, as is the case with Reflexis Task Manager, the recall notification doesn’t ‘fall through the cracks’ if a store manager is off sick or on vacation. If the primary manager responsible for handling a recall is not in the store, the task is automatically assigned to the appropriate backupto ensure it is completed.
Due in part to the increasingly global natureof supply chains, the number of product recalls will continue to increase. Retailers and their suppliers are investigating and implementing new technologies such as sensors and RFID tags to better identify and monitor products as they make the journey from the point of manufacture to store shelves. However, the effectiveness of these new technologies will be diluted if retail chains continue to rely on out-dated tools such as e-mail or the telephone to communicate product recalls to their stores. After all, what good is it to be able to identify the cause, source and location of affected products in the case of a recall if consumers are still purchasing them because they haven’t been withdrawn from store shelves?
OP Choudhary is head of European operations at Reflexis Systems, a workforce and task management solutions specialist.
