Supply Chain News Bites - Only from SCDigest
 

-April 27, 2007

 
 

EPCGlobal Announces Standard for EPCIS

 
 

Will it help drive RFID value? Our Mark Fralick Weighs in

 
 

SCDigest Editorial Staff

 
 

EPCGlobal, the standards and educational group driving adopting of the Electronic Product Code (EPC) version of RFID, announced this week the release of the first standards for an EPC Information System, or EPCIS.

What is an EPCIS? According to EPCGlobal, an “EPCIS is used to track the progress of objects as they move through the supply chain. The data shared at each read point in the supply chain provides the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE and WHY of each EPC event. The EPCIS Standard provides the foundation necessary for the capture, communication and discovery of EPC event data. It enables standard event capture and query interfaces for obtaining and sharing data about unique objects in the supply chain within and across organizations.”

Boiling that down, an EPCIS is really about three main things, according to Supply Chain Digest’s Mark Fralick:

1. How a conversation about EPC Information begins by providing mechanisms for authentication and authorization.

2. The types of conversations between systems that can take place (Where is this Tag, Where has this tag been, What cases are contained on this pallet, etc),

3. Providing a software neutral mechanism to get this done in the form of XML-based Web Services.

According to Fralick, the concept of an EPCIS “is a necessary step to achieve the sort of supply chain ubiquity EPC Global had always envisaged as it provides the consistent basis for products and tools to yield real value from EPC data."  In theory, it should make integration of RFID data into enterprise systems and RFID-based analytic application easier to develop.

 
     
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