Logistics - Increasing intelligence in supply chains

Efficient and reliable supply chain is important to trade and industry. The wireless data transfer technique and sensor technology enables significant development of the supply chain. New technology can change the business process models and can give speed to the growth of the e-logistics. The overall objective was the development and integration of an intelligent measurement and control system for the transport supply chain. The IT architecture of intelligent monitoring equipment was created in the project. The architecture showed the complexity and demanding nature of these systems. Information platform for supply chain and network applications is missing. Now when companies try to pilot and implement RFID identification, the lack of architectures is slowing or preventing this development. The automated data transfer between companies is still a barrier. The project described possible solutions for information architectures for supply chain monitoring. A case study dealing with temperature in a food chain showed that even this simple task is challenging in today's supply chains. Identification is a prerequisite for automated monitoring. Automated identification of transport units, pallets, roller gages etc. is becoming common within next years. This will even down the way to intelligent packaging. Electronics industry as well as paper industry is already using data logger type monitoring technologies in their supply chains. Food industry will follow, partly due to the new legislation. The challenge is to introduce wireless and real time solutions.