Traceability is not a new concept in Vietnam, but it still hasn’t been widely applied yet, because both manufacturing companies and consumers haven’t realized the importance and value of traceability.
TRU is a new word for businesses in Vietnam, it closely related to traceability. You should know more about TRU to better understand about traceability.
What is TRU?
TRU is the word to make shorter for the phrase “traceable resource unit” The unit traceable here means the unit that can be traced. The traceable unit here means the unit that people want to track or the unit that has recorded information in the traceability system.
Traceable Resource Unit (TRU) Traceable Resource Unit (TRU) is “the unit that the company wants to trace” or “the unit that the company records information on in the traceability system”. In this document, TRU can be taken as a common term for all types of batches and trade units.
In the world they still use TRU as a basic unit used in traceability to apply to units that can be traced such as the batch of goods or the information you want to convey to customers and partners via every stage of the production process.
Granularity
The Granularity depends on the physical size of the TRU, the smaller the TRU the smaller the granularity. . When implementing a traceability system, companies have to make a decision on the granularity they want.
Example: For a fish processing company, it is possible to see they assign a new batch number everyday, every shift (2-3 times per day) or each time they change raw materials (1 to 20 times per day). The lower the granularity, t, the more TRUs they will have, the more work will be involved, and the more accurate the traceability system will be. Granularity can be a particularly important consideration when planning for potential product recalls; the larger the granularity the more products will have to be recalled if anything goes wrong.
In a nutshell, TRU is all information units that businesses want partners, customers or consumers can be traced. The smaller the TRU, the smaller the granularity , the more involved in providing more informations. For example, the parties involved in providing information may be: production farms, producing and packaging place, retail supermarkets, etc. Each unit provides TRUs with different levels of detail to serves for the information search needs of paties and provides information to consumers. Many businesses now on the market also provide information with a very wide TRU as a website link to see some information about the product. This TRU is so large so it is not traceability but merely supplements information.