Container Centralen to Monitor Millions of Crates

"The focus was on understanding how the crate-cycle information can be captured from RFID readers, while at the same time using the RFID information in the chain for tracking and tracing of the goods from manufacture to store," says Willemsen.

Oracle has been incorporating RFID capabilities into its products, says Chen, and is now focusing on EPCIS. "As opposed to a standalone project, [with EPCIS] you can use the data in conjunction with business intelligence, business-activity monitoring and integration capabilities," she explains. "It's more than catching data from farm to factory to distribution to store. What's important is getting a global view of the picture [by sharing the data]."

Willemsen believes the EPCIS network will make data sharing easier. "The whole architecture is scalable to cover a large group of distributed EPCIS event repositories," he says. These repositories could be alternate sets of data for different customers or users of the containers. "This can be easily extended to include more and more Container Centralen customers."

"The first key learnings from the pilot are around the delicate balance of distributed and centralized data," says Willemsen. The system can query all the information required to do full-cycle time analysis—that is, the details regarding how long a specific crate spent in transit and in each location along the supply chain. "The question is how much of that data will be drawn into a centralized application," he says.

Willemsen hopes the pilot will provide an opportunity to learn how to use the data generated, and how much of it to make available to his partners.

The pilot, which has been underway for several months, should be completed by the end of the year, Chen predicts. As crates pass through factories, distribution centers and stores, readers send data wirelessly to the EPCIS database. Container Centralen will work with its partners on reader compatibility issues with the company's RFID tags; some may already be using RFID interrogators, while others will need to have them installed.

In the meantime, Chen says, Oracle's customers are asking numerous questions about EPCIS. "We've definitely seen a lot of interest."

Earlier this year, consumer products firm Unilever launched its own EPCIS pilot project, involving the application of Gen 2 EPC tags to cases of goods, and the use of an EPCIS-based system to share tag data with retailers (see Unilever Expects Big Gains From Its RFID Data-Sharing Trial).