National Demonstrator Projects and Their Implications to Business Process Integration
Prof. John P.T. Mo, RMIT University, Australia

The National Demonstrator Project (NDP) was the first in the world to demonstrate the principle in the use of the EPC network to support inter-organisational transactions and supply chain management. The project involved 13 consortium members in which 6 were trading partners. After careful consideration of the trading activities in the consortium, 9 products were used in the NDP with 15 use cases defined in the business transactions to examine the viability of RFID tracking. The project report, which was launched at Impetus 2006, illustrated several potential benefit areas to companies adopting the technology. The success of NDP encouraged the partners to continue with an extension to investigate how RFID can be implemented in real processes and integrating the data with business information system. The NDP extension concentrated on assets, in this case pallets. Management of assets throughout the supply chain is an onerous and surprisingly complex task. As assets move between trading partners, any irregularities are hard to spot at the time, and are difficult to reconcile at a later date. This NDP extension is to address the issue of real time asset management with alerts built in the system to control reconciliation to occur at the point of breakdown. The project report was launched at SMART Conference. This talk gives an overview of the development work in the two demonstrator projects and summaries the findings and achievements. We also discuss the implications to full integration with business processes in industry and outline the future possibility of RFID technology in Australia.