Service Quality, Traceability, and Tracking: Key Concepts

Posted on Jan 31, 2025 in Business Administration and Innovation Management

Service Quality and Its Dimensions

Quality: A property or set of properties inherent in something, which can be judged for their value.

Type of service a customer receives consists of:

Technical quality: What the customer receives through their interactions with service companies.

Functional quality: How they move through the technical elements of the service.

The Dimensions of Service Quality

  1. Reliability: Ability to perform the promised service accurately and consistently.
  2. Responsiveness: Desire to help customers and provide prompt service.
  3. Tangibles: Appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication materials.
  4. Assurance: Attention shown by employees and their ability to inspire confidence. This includes:
    • Competence: Possession of required skills and knowledge to perform the service.
    • Courtesy: Education of staff in customer contact.
    • Credibility: Trustworthiness of the service provider.
    • Safety: Freedom from danger or doubt.
  5. Empathy: Individual attention offered by companies to consumers:
    • Access
    • Communication
    • Understanding the customer

Key Factors for Achieving Quality

  1. Provide added value to the customer.
  2. Offer products with appropriate value for money.
  3. Purchase at competitive prices.
  4. Learn to do better than the competition.
  5. Management commitment and clear goals.
  6. Ongoing training.

Traceability: Reconstructing Product History

Traceability: The ability to reconstruct the history of a product. Monitoring of the product, allowing procedures to know the history, location, and path of a product along the supply chain:

  • Origin of the component
  • History of the processes applied
  • Distribution and location after delivery

This is modern and associated with the highest quality products for the customer.

When we talk about traceability for export, it should be overcome as a cultural issue. There is a demand for verifiable traceability systems. If not applicable to the level of each box, the entire shipment must be withdrawn, causing huge economic losses for the company and the country. New marketing can help companies manage inputs and outputs with more efficiency, safety, hygiene, and product quality. Utilities: efficient management of logistics, consumer protection, and increased productivity.

ISO 8402: Ability to trace the history and application of a body by registered indications.

How to Implement Traceability

  • Log info: Each agent involved in generating traceability information. For this, correct identification of goods is essential.
  • All units of consumption must be encoded to be identified individually. All units must have the expiration date or batch number printed.
  • Transmission of info: Information from one agent to the next in the supply chain.

Tracking and Tracing

Tracking: Ability to follow the path from the point of origin to final consumption.

Tracing: Identify the source of a product through records from the point of consumption back to the supply chain.

Benefits of Traceability

  1. Achieves accuracy in identifying causes of an accident if food-related.
  2. Allows proper control and administration within the company.
  3. Acts as a differentiator to achieve competitive advantages.
  4. Enables compliance with legal requirements from the buyer abroad.
  5. Unifies information for marketing the product.
  6. Provides consumers with a reliable product.
  7. Strengthens the image of the country as a source of safe and quality products.