The advent of e-business has created several challenges and opportunities in the supply chain environment and the current trend is to try to leverage the benefits obtained through information sharing across the supply chain to improve operational performance, customer service, and solution development.

 

At the same time there is a clear turn and focus on the customer, on increasing consumer value and ultimately on building consumer enthusiasm. In this context, the suggested project aims to support intelligent business networking and

consumer services based on effective and efficient information/knowledge sharing and collaboration across supply chain partners, capitalizing on the fact that products are uniquely identified with the use of smart tagging technology.

 

Currently, automatic product identification implementations take place internally within a company, mainly at case or pallet level with the objective to automate warehouse processes. On the other hand, supply chain collaboration relies on information about product type and in seldom cases lot-numbers.

 

The objective of this project is to enable innovative supply chain collaboration processes and consumer value management exploiting the possibility for unique product identification across the supply chain. The project will be based on a distributedsoftware-architecture and innovative electronic services, capitalizing on existing infrastructures and standards, in order to support real time information sharing, decision making and collaboration among supply chain partners, as well as information services to educated customers. Specific processes that will be tackled include the process of collaborative planning

and replenishment, product tracking and traceability, reverse logistics, promotions management and consumer in-store support.