Towards an enterprise location service

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has a lot of potential to automate business processes and improve visibility across the supply chain. To realize the full potential of RFID, an IT infrastructure is required that manages readers, filters and aggregates raw RFID data, but also facilitates data exchange among the supply chain partners. In this paper we first provide an overview of the EPC network, an architecture developed by the Auto-ID center and its successor organisation EPCglobal, that addresses the above requirements. We then propose the concept of an enterprise location service that captures all location information about products and assets within the enterprise to enable what we call business process debugging.