An increasing number of companies want to improve product traceability for several reasons: to meet stricter government regulations about food and medical safety, to cope with ever-stronger consumer demands to know exactly what they are buying, and to improve and protect the company's brand value through more transparent business operations. Two aspects of traceability are technically important: (1) techniques for tracing the events associated with the goods a company handles at all necessary points of the business operation, possibly through the use of IC tags and tag readers; and (2) ways to store, manage, and use the collected logs of events either to cope with problems or to improve business processes.

In this paper, we first review currently available traceability systems by considering examples from real-world situations. After that, we discuss the likely directions and possibilities of next-generation traceability systems.