RFID and Information Management for Services Supply Chains; Towards Holistic Data Access and Management

The adoption of data capture technologies such as RFID could result in real interactivity and customer centric global services supply chains or could flood companies with data on top of the mountains of data already collected, stored, underutilized and underexploited. The paper suggest a centralized data access design for the terabytes of data expected from RFID chips or whatever data capture technology is embraced. RFID is currently designed for local and often dyadic use in limited circumstances generating data but what is needed are advances in information management to manage this data and to communicate the needs once actionable information is identified. Businesses are struggling with the current data and we suggest that a new perspective is needed for this level of data capture. Once such perspective is the services supply chain rather than product supply chain perspective. We also suggest that RFID is a product rather than a service orientated technology and as such we should have business cases for use within services and not simply product supply chains. Also much of the information management along the supply chain does not have a customer orientation and is dominated by the major players and their often proprietary information systems. We suggest that customer orientation is needed at all stages of the supply chain and customer information be provided to all parties in real time, synchronized and updated with applied intelligence. There are two general technical approaches or solutions which offer themselves. Firstly effective middleware that helps to integrate distributed information aligned to or in place of the proprietary systems currently in place. Secondly and more ambitious in scope would be to have a independent data clearing house jointly owned and operated by all parties but yet completely independent of any single partner