EPCIS-Based Supply Chain Event Management – A Quantitative Comparison of Candidate System Architectures

Supply chain event management (SCEM) systems are decision support systems that allow for monitoring, prioritizing and reacting to events pertaining to the flow of goods in a supply chain. A major current trend in logistics concerns the tracking of materials by using the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. RFID reader data can be contextualized in the form of standardized supply chain events and exchanged along the supply chain in order to provide the informational basis of SCEM. Using analytical methods, we evaluate two candidate system architectures that enable the cross-company exchange of supply chain events with respect to efficiency and reliability: Event Pull proposed by the industry consortium EPCglobal and Event Push. Event Push is shown to be particularly suitable for the realization of SCEM applications.