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. |