TABLE OF CONTENTS Two atomic (or most basic) measurements within any supply chain are the item and the quantity. Decisions that impact the health of a supply chain are based on the quantities of any item anywhere in the pipeline. Hence knowing how much of what item is available in the supply chain is extremely important.
Before a quantity can be determined, identifying and sorting items that are alike is important. Physical characteristics are used to distinguish between objects and to identify them (e.g., 10 mm and 20 mm, as a measurement of the diameter of bolts), but objects that are not visible cannot be manually distinguished from other objects (e.g., items inside a carton), therefore some mechanism must be used to identify them. An example of a manual identification process would be to open a carton (or the enclosing entity) and count the items within it that are alike. To facilitate identification and counting processes, industry has improved upon this type of manual identification technique with technologies such as basic labels, barcodes, biometric scanners (e.g., retina scans), radio frequency identification (RFID), etc., which has resulted in widespread use of identification technology in industry.
Realizing that identification technology is an enabler of business processes is important. By themselves, identification technologies have no value added for a business. The technologies are merely pieces of paper (such as labels and bar-codes) or microchips (RFID), but if incorporated into business processes with the proper hardware and software, the shift to significant value added for...
