Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) is a global GS1 Standard for creating and sharing supply chain information, both within and across enterprises, which enables companies to gain shared, often real time visibility of their end-to-end supply chains. Anyone who has been involved with trying to make business processes and information flow across multiple organisations and IT systems will understand the value of such standards to govern data format and transfer methods. This is the reason for the existence of organisations like GS1 and why it’s member organisations pay it’s fees, and often contribute significant employee time to helping develop these standards. This is also why those same member organisations implore regulators to adopt and mandate those standards in their legislation.
Today, compliance to these standards brings benefits such as a reduction in the cost of maintenance or upgrade of interconnected system and increased agility to change supply chains. In future, adherence to these standards will be the key enabler that allows companies to take advantage of supply chain big data, artificial intelligence and end-to-end visibility technologies that will bring benefits simply not possible today.
During the global deployment of Pharma serialisation/traceability over the last 15 years, much time and effort has been put into the development of the EPCIS standards to enable the frictionless flow of supply chain visibility information, but what exactly does it mean to be ‘compliant’ with EPCIS?
Does it mean ensuring the EPCIS messages you generate and receive conform to the EPCIS Schema and Core Business Vocabulary and conform to published guidelines from GS1 Member organisations?
Or does it mean that systems just work for getting data from point A to point B and hopefully loosely follow EPCIS?
And how do we measure and monitor this compliance?
Within your own organisation, are your system suppliers claiming their compliance is sufficient? Are the various EPCIS compliance/testing services adequate?
And what importance is the industry placing on being ‘compliant’ in any form?
In response to a global manufacturer wanting to evaluate their overall EPCIS compliance, Be4ward, supported by tools from their partner Jenneson, developed a four-level methodology focusing on:
- Technical adherence to the EPCIS standards
- Measuring risk associated with the proper/improper use of EPCIS for market regulatory compliance
- Best practice EPCIS design to enable future value opportunities from serialisation/traceability data
Our in depth compliance review allows you to take control of your own EPCIS compliance.
Contact us to learn how Be4ward’s approach can help you identify and mitigate foundational EPCIS data issues.