State of the art in tracking based business

Item-centric control and information management is a potential solution to establish economically and practically feasible Concurrent Enterprises. The economical feasibility of item-centric tracking is based on recent technological developments for monitoring the material flow on the item-level instead of the material type-level. Item-centric control and information management is an approach that offers companies opportunities to better track and trace assets over their lifecycle and manage supply chain operations across organizational boundaries by using for example RFID. In this paper an application framework for tracking based business is presented, based on realized track and trace cases from the passed two years. Based on this framework examples for developing (advanced) tracking based businesses are proposed. The most challenging business case to formulate for a company new to RFID is to immediately aim for info-centric services in supply chain management such as letting the customer follow the production of his customized product.