Design options for supply chain visibility services: learnings from three EPCIS implementations

Supply chains in many industries are experiencing an ever-growing complexity. They involve many actors and, similar to intra-organizational processes, visibility is an important enabler for managing supply chains in an inter-organizational setting. It is the backbone of advanced supply chain (event) management solutions, which serve to detect critical incidents in time and to determine alternative actions. Due to the numerous heterogeneous parties involved, distributed supply chains call for a modular system architecture that aims at re-using visibility data from standardized sources. Following the wide variety of supply chain configurations in many industries there are also many options to design such services. This paper sheds light on these aspects by conducting a case study on EPCIS, a global service specification for capturing and sharing visibility data. Based on three implementations, it shows design options for a supply chain visibility service, generic operator models as well as major potentials.