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Longer lasting Belts, New Split Spools -- no regrind:Layout 1 8/26/2009 4: 37 AM Page 1
systems and equipment to enable
their use as a cost burden. He says
widespread adoption of standards
is likely to happen only as a result
of pressure from either government
regulations, as now exist for food
shippers, or from big
end customers such
as Walmart, which
is mandating compliance with food
traceability initiatives
by the end of June.
“That should have a
domino effect with
other retailers,” he
says.
Greater adoption of technology
like bar codes and radio-frequency
identification (RFID) tags will also
aid in capturing the data needed
for tracking and tracing. A sur-
vey Motorola conducted last year
among 3PLs, retailers, wholesalers,
and manufacturers indicated that
about two-thirds of goods inbound
to distribution centers and plants
carry bar codes today. The study
projected that the number would
rise to 83 percent by 2018. And
RFID usage rates are expected to
jump to 38 percent from the cur-
rent 21 percent.
Wheeler expects pressure will
mount on suppliers to tag goods
as omnichannel and direct-to-con-
sumer business models develop. “As
you go to omnichannel and you
want a single set of inventory, you
almost have to be source tagged,”
he says. “You want to be able to
do no-touch item-level receiving,
no-touch order verification. That’s
somewhat forward looking, but it is
definitely a trend.”
Should that trend become reality,
it promises to provide companies
that use 3PLs with an even clearer,
more timely view of just what’s
happening to their inventory. N
ASN is sent by the supplier, it becomes vis-
ible to all in the WMS system. It becomes
visible to the 3PL, and at the same time,
becomes visible to the client. It is all about
visibility and having real-time information
to act upon.”
Of course, the information
in any system is only as good
as the information provided,
and that’s where the tools
for capturing information
as goods move from the
yard to receiving to putaway
to picking to shipping are
so critical. As Stubbs says,
“Certainly, you need to be
able to capture information
not only accurately but in real time and
present it to the system of record to pro-
vide real-time visibility to balance on hand,
shipment status, receipt status, those types
of things. That’s critical to managing the
separate inventory buckets. The way to do
that is through electronic capture, whether
that be through mobile computing, scan-
ning, or voice. Typically, it’s a combination
of all of those.”
BETTER STANDARDS?
What’s likely to make that work much more
seamlessly in the future is the use of data
capture standards that can provide end-to-end traceability. The development of such
standards, at least in theory, would have all
parties in a supply chain working with the
same sets of data. The goal, Wheeler says,
is to have one way of encoding product
for an industry that would allow anyone in
the supply chain to scan and capture data.
A single bar code could work from source
to final destination. “That will be a huge
change that a lot of industries can use,” he
says. Producers and distributors of perishable foods are leading the way, driven by
traceability requirements embedded in law.
But more industries are certain to follow,
Wheeler believes.
That sort of standardization has a ways
to go before it sees widespread adoption.
For one thing, Gonzalez says, standards
are often that in name only, as companies adopt standards and then fine-tune
them to their own needs. And Stubbs
expects many companies will resist adopting standards, seeing the need to purchase
