What is Track and Trace?

Track and trace is the record of where a shipment has been and what state it is in: tracking reports where it is now, tracing rebuilds how it got there.

Two questions reach the same desk and only one of them is a tracking question. Where is it now is answered by the most recent event the system holds. What happened to it has to be rebuilt from every event before that, and those events exist only if somebody recorded them.

What a trace is actually built from

Two of the records a shipment leaves behind exist because a rule says so.

The first is the shipment's own document. A for-hire motor carrier must issue a receipt or bill of lading carrying the names of the consignor and consignee, the origin and destination points, the number of packages, a description of the freight and its weight^[bol]. Read that list for what is absent: no time, no position, no condition. The bill of lading fixes who and what, not when and where.

The second is the vehicle's. An electronic logging device automatically records date, time, the vehicle's geographic location, engine hours, vehicle miles and the identity of driver, vehicle and carrier^[eld]. While the truck is moving it writes an intermediate record whenever there has not been one in the previous 1 hour^[eld]; where that record falls during authorised personal use, the location is blurred to roughly a 10-mile radius^[eld]. That is an hours-of-service record about a tractor: it can put a vehicle near a dock, not name the pallet that came off it.

Every other event — a gate scan, a dock timestamp, an exception code, a signature at the door — is captured because a contract asked for it. That is why traces have holes, and why the holes sit at the handovers nobody was obliged to record.

Tracking, tracing and the words used beside them

Four words share this neighbourhood, and buying the wrong one is expensive.

Two further distinctions decide whether a trace is worth anything. The first is level: a shipment-level trace says the load arrived, an item-level trace says which cartons did not, and only the second settles a shortage. The second is custody, because positions are not handovers and a damage argument is an argument about handovers.

The difference bills, too. Detention charges are argued from an arrival time and a departure time, so a trace full of map positions and empty of gate events cannot evidence one.

What a dispute over a trace turns on

The argument is rarely about where the truck was.

A freight claim is a written communication, filed with the right carrier, that identifies the shipment, asserts liability for the loss, damage, injury or delay, and claims a specified or determinable amount^[claim]. The same rule then says what surprises anyone who trusts a scan trail: bad-order reports, notations of shortage or damage on a freight bill or delivery receipt, and a carrier's own inspection reports do not, standing alone, satisfy it^[claim]. The trace is evidence. It is not the claim.

Then the clocks, which outlast most retention policies. A carrier's contract may not allow less than 9 months to file a claim, nor less than 2 years to bring a civil action once the claim has been declined^[carmack]. Facing the other way, the carrier must pay, decline or make a firm compromise settlement offer within 120 days of receiving the claim, and explain the delay every 60-day period until it does^{[disposition]}. A record that cannot be produced two years later is not a trace.

So the work sits upstream of the argument: capture each event where it happens and keep it against one shipment, not in four systems holding a fragment each. Mid-mile planning and last-mile delivery write that record for the legs they run; multi-hub network management is where the legs stay one shipment across hubs and carriers.

The limits of this definition

The contract outranks the dictionary. What gets captured, how often, who may see it and how long it is kept are set by the rate confirmation or the carrier's tariff. No federal rule obliges a motor carrier to show anybody where a truck is.

Sometimes the words name a legal obligation rather than a service level. In pharmaceutical distribution, tracing is statutory: transaction information has to move with the product carrying a product identifier at the package level, exchanged electronically between trading partners^[dscsa]. A freight system that reports positions is not a compliance system.

The word moves with the mode. This entry is written for road freight. A container's trace runs through terminal, vessel and customs systems, and Shyftbase works land-based freight only — no air, ocean, port or customs work — so the freight glossary marks that edge on every entry touching the water.

A definition is not an integration. Naming the record does not create it. A trace spans a network only when every party's events land in one place under one shipment identifier, which is an integration problem before it is a vocabulary problem. What Shyftbase claims here is item-level traceability: a statement about the record, not about the map.