Traceability System for Manufacturer Accountability

OVERVIEW: In recent years, regulations concerning the observance of environmental laws have been made stricter, particularly in the EU (European Union), but in the rest of the world community as well. To protect their brand images, it has become essential for companies to respond to requirements for improvement of product quality and accountability to the customer. That has created a demand for a “traceability system” for managing the information related to individual products over the entire product lifecycle, beginning with the planning stage and including design, manufacture, maintenance and disposal. On the other hand, the management of information on individual products involves an immense amount of data, which severely affects the performance of data search and retrieval. To deal with this problem, Hitachi developed a real-harmonious BOM (bill of materials) product traceability system, which employs an on-memory computing engine produced by the Turbo Data Laboratories, Inc. to improve computation performance and achieve efficient data search. We have also developed an accountability system that is built on a real-harmonious BOM as the kernel and is capable of verifying the individual history of each product item. Shinichi Kojima Hiroshi Nakanishi Kazuo Yoda Hiroshi Sora