Global Commerce Initiative EPC Roadmap - GlobalScorecard.net

Global Commerce Initiative EPC Roadmap
1.2 Executive Summary
The radio frequency identification (RFID) technology
was born midway through the last century and more
or less forgotten for decades.
In the last years of the 1990s, however, new interest
was sparked for this “new” technology that
promises to streamline and speed up inventories,
supply chains, and payment processes. It also
promises in the long run to change the way we do
business irrevocably.
Much has been written of late about how RFID is
bringing a wealth of new technologies — and their
resulting new business processes — into this first
decade of the 21st century.
And it’s not all media hype. Little doubt exists in the
minds of most industry leaders that harnessing this
technology and using the resulting applications and
What Is an EPC?
The Electronic Product Code (EPC) has
been called the “next generation bar
code,” but it is much more than that.
The EPC basically is a coding scheme
developed by the Auto-ID Center that
uniquely can identify an individual
item — whether that object is a consumer
item, case, pallet, logistics asset,
or virtually anything else. Instead of
being printed on a paper label as with
today’s bar-coding system, this number
is inserted into an electronic tag that
can be detected with radio waves. This
provides the ability to locate or track
products through the supply chain,
and to “read” these EPCs at a distance
and out of direct-line-of-sight.
processes will have an impact even more
revolutionary and far-reaching than the introduction
of the Universal Product Code (U.P.C.) and retail
scanning a quarter of a century ago.
It is because of this immense scope and the equally
immense potential of this initiative that it was
decided that the Auto-ID Center, which had
spearheaded the industry project since its inception
in 1999, would be succeeded by two organisations
— the Auto-ID Labs and EPCglobal.
The Auto-ID Labs began in the autumn of 2003 to
carry on the technical and research aspects of the
initiative. Six labs comprise the Auto-ID Labs group
and are located in the US, Great Britain, Australia,
Japan, Switzerland and China.
EPCglobal was created in the autumn of 2003 as
a joint venture of EAN International and the
Uniform Code Council (UCC). The launch of this
organisation signals a redoubled drive toward a
worldwide, multi-industry adoption of the key
identification aspect of RFID — the Electronic
Product Code or EPC — and its network of links to
Internet technologies. The new organisation is
charged with setting the EPC vision — a vision of
companies having complete visibility in their
standards-based, integrated supply chains at any
time in any country in the world.
EPCglobal will spearhead efforts to support open,
voluntary global standards for this new initiative
and to promote the adoption of the EPC. It will also
assist companies by providing the latest
information on implementation, applications, pilots
and field tests and more.
Electronic Product Code (EPC) 1
The EPC Number (96 bit version)
01.203D2A9.168B8.719BAE03C
4 © Copyright November 2003, Global Commerce Initiative/IBM