Dec 21, 2014A commercial invoice is a document used in foreign trade, as a customs declaration provided by the person or corporation that is exporting an item across international borders. Although there is no standard format, the document must include a few specific pieces of information, including the parties involved in the shipping transaction, the goods being transported, the country of manufacture and the Harmonized System codes for those goods. A commercial invoice must also include a statement certifying that the invoice is true, as well as the signature of the individual making that statement.
A commercial invoice is used to calculate tariffs, international commercial terms—such as the cost in a cost, insurance and freight CIF) document—and is commonly used for customs purposes. Normally, when goods are a full case, identifying the country of origin (COO) is easy. But when an item can be produced at several locations and placed in the same case at your facility, it becomes difficult to ensure that information on the commercial invoice is correct.
Some companies have created multiple tables to maintain the COO associated with each inventory item, and must use them when printing commercial invoices. This strategy requires several employees to continually update and maintain the tables. Even this does not guarantee that the correct country of origin is assigned to an item, however, unless someone visually checks every product's COO.
This is where RFID can make this process less complicated, while also ensuring that the COO information is always accurate. GS1 standards dictate that for a 96-bit RFID tag, the serial number in an Electronic Product Code (EPC) can be no more than 38 bits and that, therefore, when read as a decimal numeral, it must be less than or equal to 274,877,906,943. In simple terms, this 12-digit decimal number can be shown as XXX,XXX,XXX,XXX.
In your serialization scheme, you can use the first two to four positions for the COO, with the first position designating who encoded the EPC. For example, you can make the first digit a 0 if the EPC was encoded internally, or a 1 if it was encoded by your RFID label vendor or service bureau.
When encoding the specific country in which an item was manufactured, it is best to use the UN numeric code (ISO 3166-1 numeric-3), as well as the Geopolitical Entities and Codes (formerly FIPS PUB 10-4 code) for nations, dependencies and other areas.
For example, when encoding the EPC for a product made in Vietnam, you can use that country's UN/ISO numeric code: 704. So the start of the serial number for a product made in Vietnam with an internally encoded EPC would be 0704. The serial number is combined with each EPC.
This gives you the possibility of producing 99,999,999 of the same item before repeating a serial number at each location where it is produced. Your items, encoded internally, would increase incrementally from 070,400,000,001 to 070,499,999,999.
So now you have built COO encoding into your serialization scheme. When a tagged product is about to be shipped from the manufacturing facility, an RFID reader can interrogate the EPC tag on that item's carton as it is being shipped internationally, and correctly update the order detail to make sure the COO data for all of your commercial invoices are correct, and that they match what is actually being shipped.
Doug Harvel is an IT supply chain and RFID consultant, a former co-chair of the GS1 Serialization Team and the former IT project leader at a global apparel company. If you have additional questions or comments, you can reach him at Doug.Harvel@gmail.com.
