Assessment of Standards for Inter-organizational Tracking Information Exchange in the Supply Chain

With increasing globalization and loosely-coupled business relations between different companies, the importance of information exchange standards is increasing. GS1’s Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) is currently one of the main standards proposed for interorganizational data exchange for trace and track purposes in the supply chain. However, some parts of the EPCIS framework are yet to be defined and the standard has to overcome some obstacles to be used as a global standard for trace and track applications. This paper tries to address the main question whether EPCIS has the potential to ‘take off’ as a globally accepted data-exchange standard.