Increased transparency within and beyond organizational borders by novel identifier-based services for enterprises of different size

Recent trends in production call for efficient means of tracking and tracing within and beyond company borders. The pioneering track-and-trace solutions introduced by large companies can, due to their expenses as well as their lack of flexibility, hardly be the preferred choice for networks of smaller enterprises, and the mainstream of today's new off-the-shelf business integration platforms is not targeting the small business sector either. The paper highlights the key problems to be overcome for the successful introduction of lean but extensible entry-level track-and-trace solutions and presents the concept and first pilot application results of the ongoing, EU-funded R&D project TraSer. (c) 2009 CIRP