ISURF: RFID Enabled Collaborative Supply Chain Planning Environment

Abstract

To be able to cope with the requirements of today’s competitive and demanding digital world of business, companies, especially SMEs, need to be more agile, and be ready to react to the changing requirements of the sector. This requires a better view and a more comprehensive analysis of the whole marketplace which can be achieved through a knowledge oriented collaborative supply chain planning initiative. The parties also need to be capable of monitoring the supply chain visibility in a real time fashion, which can be enabled through the use of RFID devices. RFID enabled collaborative supply chain planning has been achieved by big industry players in well defined restricted business circumstances through some selected standard message schemes. However, SMEs are still far behind in this process due to their small IT budgets. In iSURF Project we address this problem by providing a set of open source tools to enable seamless collection of supply chain visibility, synchronizing this with master data, exchanging supply chain visibility and other planning data with each other through a service oriented supply chain planning environment which also handles the interoperability of the messages exchanged