Alexey Chernyshev: manufacturers of children's clothing, get ready for marking!
AKFA, a Russian importing company specialising in import and customs clearance of footwear, clothing and accessories, is a member of the working groups for footwear marking and light industry products marking. The company has developed its own software marking solution named AKFA connect.mark. Alexey Chernyshev, Commercial Director of AKFA, spoke about the first results of shoe marking and preparations for the children's clothes marking project.
– Alexei, how successful was the pilot project for footwear marking? What were the main problems you encountered during the preparation?
– The pilot project ended in the summer of 2019, and only one company specialising in children's footwear participated in it. It was Parizhskaya Kommuna. Now we are in the stage of voluntary marking of products, when a huge number of companies have already been registered. These are thousands of companies and only CRPT (Center for Development of Perspective Technologies) knows their exact number. In my opinion, the main problems were, first of all.
– Absolute ill-preparedness of the “last mile” (the last stage of the goods delivery to the buyer) for the process of withdrawing of the product marks from the turnover.
– Software changes in CRPT, debugging, reinstalling the old software versions. It is necessary for the marking process become a normal working process, to get rid of the constant “traffic jams”.
– A slow-reacting technical support. We at AKFA have a special manager for technical issues solving, and even so, dozens of our requests remained unanswered. There is a rhetorical question: what happened to less professional companies then?!
– Reluctance of foreign manufacturers to get into new Russian realities.
– Can we already speak about any results? How have the footwear products been monitored for these six months? In which regions? Have violators been identified?
– Now, the whole chain is theoretically operational: from the products circulations start up to the withdrawal from the product turnover. But in fact, there is no withdrawal from circulation.
Therefore, by the end of 2020 a certain quantity of the CM (control marks) has been accumulated, which was put into circulation, sold, but not withdrawn. At this time, no one is engaged in detecting violations, it is too early, it is first necessary to debug the entire process to the end.
– What do the manufacturers of children's clothing have to expect this year? What are the first steps they should take in order to prepare for marking?
– Just the other day, an order was issued on the marking of the light industry products, which indicated the start date as January 1, 2021. There is not much time left to get things working well.
And in order to competently build the entire marking process, the manufacturers of children's clothing now need to:
- import product samples;
- carry out products certification;
- prepare labels according to TR TS.
And then make the marking using Data Matrix codes.
I repeat, if a company is engaged only in the transportation and warehouse processing of the goods, then the update and finalization of the software will be minimal. If your company acts as an agent and is a part of the chain of foreign trade operations, then your workload will be many times more!
We are prepared to provide extensive consultations on all the making related issues.
See you at AKFA stand!