The rail industry has to manage part maintenance over periods of up to 40 years, with flows involving numerous suppliers and subcontractors. At the Tech For Industry Show, Claude Baudry, Cash & Technical Industries Sector Manager(GS1), Charles-François Vermeesch, GS1/RFID Traceability Project Manager (SNCF Voyageurs) and François Lenci, GS1 and Digitalization Manager (ALSTOM Transport) presented their case study on deploying GS1 standards — identification, capture and data sharing — to address this traceability challenge.

GS1 is presented as the global identifier for commerce, resting on three pillars: identification standards (the well-known barcode, or GTIN), capture standards (RFID, data matrix, used to encode this identifier onto a physical medium) and data-sharing standards. These standards, deeply embedded in retail, address five needs: market access, universal referencing, process improvement, consumer safety, and traceability — extending to the circular economy and the Digital Product Passport.

SNCF Voyageurs, which has 65,000 employees (out of 275,000 across the SNCF group), transports 15 million passengers a day on 15,000 trains, and handles rolling-stock maintenance across 35 technical centers throughout France. The company joined a working group back in 2015, alongside Deutsche Bahn, the Swiss railways and Alstom, to address a concrete problem: the lack of a parts identification standard, even though part maintenance can span 40 years. GS1 was selected as the most mature standard best suited to the industry.

At Alstom — a rail manufacturer with around €20 billion in revenue, a full order book for five years, 150,000 units of rolling stock in service worldwide (more than a quarter of the global fleet) and 108 million passengers carried every day — entry into the GS1 ecosystem came from a customer requirement on the TGVM market (around €3 billion), before becoming a full internal standard.

SNCF Voyageurs deployed RFID on its trainsets as part of the BAM project (an automated measurement bench that detects acoustic and geometric defects as trains pass at 20 to 70 km/h), with a read rate close to 100%. This technology is now used to track trainsets through the wash, detect their presence at stations or technical centers, and spot axle-load anomalies. More than 3,000 passenger trainsets are now equipped (around 50% of the fleet), with a target of 80% by the end of next year.

On the parts side, the rollout became a company-wide project approved by the executive committee in 2022. The growth trajectory is clear: 65,000 parts equipped in 2023, 125,000 in 2024, 150,000 in 2025 — well beyond the 50,000 initially expected.

At Alstom, GS1 marking is now required from all suppliers under framework agreements, regardless of a specific project. On its production lines, the standard is integrated directly into the MES (Manufacturing Execution System): when an operator scans the GS1 label of a part to be assembled, three actions are triggered within a fraction of a second — a "poka-yoke" check (the system blocks the manufacturing order if the scanned part doesn't match the correct reference), automatic recording of the serial number, and recording of the GTIN, which makes it possible to precisely trace which supplier provided the assembled part — an increasingly important issue as multisourcing becomes more common to secure supply.

Both speakers report direct gains: elimination of manual data-entry errors (up to 30% error rates possible on complex serial numbers), time savings on readings (around 5 minutes per reading at Alstom, across 5 million readings a year), and the removal of quality checks that had become unnecessary — freeing quality inspectors to focus on root-cause analysis rather than manually verifying serial numbers.

On the SNCF side, a mobile app developed in 2020, Scanit, lets any operator scan a part to instantly access its identity, repair history and warranty status — where multiple different databases previously had to be checked.

On the ground, reception has evolved: from initial reluctance in 2018 to full adoption by production teams, who now ask for broader GS1 coverage rather than having it imposed on them.

GS1's third pillar, data sharing, is presented as the major challenge ahead. Today, document exchanges (compliance certificates, for example) often happen in proprietary formats (PDF, Excel), with multiple copies circulating between suppliers, customers and certification bodies. The GS1 model instead proposes a single source of truth: the document stays hosted and indexed with its issuer, based on the product's unique identifier, and stakeholders access it directly rather than receiving copies.

This principle is at the heart of the Digital Product Passport (DPP), made mandatory by the EU's ESPR regulation (Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation), adopted in June 2024 by the European Commission. To be placed on the European market, a product will need a unique identifier, be scannable, and provide access to online data on its sustainability — GS1's three pillars. These requirements come into force next year for the battery sector, before gradually extending to other sectors.

Alstom also raises the prospect of a digital twin for spare parts: scanning a purchased part would eventually make it possible to verify its authenticity, access its repair history and maintenance documentation — a differentiating service in the spare-parts market.

The rail industry extends beyond national borders: SNCF Réseau, for example, was approached by Swedish operator Trafikverket, whose RFID-tagged freight trains run as far as France, illustrating the need for a harmonized tag position from one country to another for the technology to work. GS1 structures this cooperation through regional interest communities (France-Belgium, German-speaking area) bringing together sometimes-competing players (Alstom, Hitachi, CAF), as well as through the European Rail Dataspace, a consortium involving SNCF, Alstom and Siemens to define the governance rules for future data sharing at the European scale.

The SNCF Voyageurs and Alstom case study shows how an identification standard, rolled out gradually from concrete use cases, can become a structuring company-wide project for industrial traceability. Beyond the operational gains already measured, both players are now preparing for the next step: large-scale data sharing, driven by European regulation on the Digital Product Passport.

Watch the full panel, along with the other Tech For Industry Show replays, on our dedicated page.