Target, Wal-Mart Share EPC Data

The pilot will help the Data-Exchange Working Group determine whether the agreed-upon formats work in the real world. The live exchange of data might reveal that more data elements are needed, or that the current attributes need to be changed. The data structures might eventually be incorporated into the standards for the EPCglobal Network, a means of exchanging data associated with EPCs over an Internet-based network hosted by EPCglobal.

Meranda says that standardized data structures will lower the cost of sharing data for manufacturers. "The less time you have to spend aligning data with your trading partners, the less expensive it is to implement a network-connectivity relationship with someone else," he says. Today, it costs companies thousands of dollars per month to do electronic data interchange over value-added networks.

About a year ago, EPCglobal's Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Business Action Group, which includes Target, Wal-Mart and several major CPG manufacturers, established a Data Exchange Working Group to create the business cases and processes that could be improved by sharing EPC data. The working group began examining how retailers and manufacturers could enable the automatic communication of EPC data.

The members defined and examined all the potential cases, such as new product introduction management, promotion management and store replenishment, where RFID data might be useful. They then created some 50 data elements that could be associated with an EPC, including the business step associated with the read (shipping, receiving and so on); the location of the reader (manufacturer's distribution center, retailer's distribution center, back of store); the status of the product (available for sale, damaged, being returned); and so forth. Finally, they developed the XML tags and schema—coding that software applications can use to process and communicate those elements automatically, in a standardized way.

The Fast-Moving Consumer Goods EPCglobal Business Action Group agreed to the pilot, which just started, at a meeting in Atlanta last month. For the first phase, the retailers are transmitting the data to the manufacturers in the agreed-upon format over the AS2 system. The next phase, slated for early next year, will test applications that take advantage of the data. Once EPCglobal finalizes the standards for the EPC Information Service, the manufacturers and retailers will test the ability to share data over the EPCglobal Network.

"This is elemental data—the EPC, plus time, date, location and so on—structured so it's understood by a trading partner," says Meranda. "Getting the data structure right is the first step toward being able to answer the more complicated questions that the EPCglobal Network will help with."