Design Considerations for Supply Chain Tracking Systems

Supply chain tracking systems are becoming imperative to help achieve competitive advantages from efficiency and responsiveness improvement, and comply with social awareness of product safety, security, and sustainability. It is important to design the supply chain tracking system in such a way that it can achieve the desired benefits and minimize the costs at the same time. However, there are various challenges to gain this cost effectiveness with regard to technologies, standards, operations, and strategies. Moreover, there are no complete design principles available at this moment. It is the intent of this paper to provide a framework for designing a cost-effective supply chain tracking system. We will explain the main considerations for a tracking system design and articulate how to coordinate various considerations to reach the optimal design in an economical way. Ultimately, we want to provide some feasible and practical guidelines to support and simplify the decision making process for building supply chain tracking systems. Keywords: design considerations; supply chain tracking systems; RFID; supply chain management