A low-cost perspective in identifier-based services of supply chains

Several major challenges of today’s industrial production, especially in supply chains and production networks with ongoing changes and critical customer demands, can be answered by introducing tracking and tracing services and extending them, over organizational borders, to the entire network in question. The pioneering track-and-trace solutions introduced by large companies can, due to their expenses as well as their lack of flexibility, hardly be the preferred choice for networks of smaller enterprises, and even the mainstream of today’s new off-the-shelf business integration platforms is not targeting the small business sector. The paper highlights the key problems to be overcome for successful introduction of lean but extensible entry-level track-and-trace solutions and presents the concept and first pilot application results of the ongoing R&D project TraSer in this field.