Challenge
ASSURING
PRODUCT
CONFORMITY
Businesses, consumers and public officials have specific expectations about the quality, safety, reliability, interoperability, efficiency and environmental sustainability of products. Conformity assessment provides the means to verify compliance of products to these expectations, in accordance with relevant standards, regulations and other specifications. Conformity assessment builds trust by reinforcing product safety for consumption.
National verification of conformity programs are usually driven by the Ministry of Industry, Bureau of Standards or Customs, who rely on the third-party assessment model defined by ISO* in order to verify regulatory compliance. This assessment model is based on risk evaluation and depends on product legislation, the traders involved and their trading history.
Today, billions of conformity marks are applied on products to show they meet conformity obligations (e.g. CE mark, UL mark…). Most of these marks are however not secured, cannot be authenticated and do not allow product traceability back to the point of manufacture.
This is significant issue which prevents authorities, economic operators and consumers from verifying individual product origin, and undermines trust for those who trade, purchase or consume.
SICPA has developed conformity marks and systems that address these challenges, by building an additional trust layer on top of the existing third party conformity assessment activities. This technology platform is called SICPATRACE®. It:
- Marks each product with a unique and secure conformity mark at production, enabling verification of product life cycle to the point of sale;
- Provides a Government-owned database that links the detail of conformity marks with associated third party assessment information as stipulated in legislation;
- Gives law enforcers, economic operators and consumers the means to authenticate and trace product origin and to detect counterfeits.
With our long experience in country-wide track and trace solutions, SICPA is recognised as the expert partner to strengthen conformity assessment and conformity mark programs.
* ISO CASCO