Regional purchase orders dissemination and shipments aggregation of agricultural products with interworking EPC network and EDI system

This paper proposes an Electronic Product Code (EPC) based supply chain visibility system framework which interworks with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system which manages its orders and inventory with non-EPC stock keeping units (SKU) and their quantity. The feature of the framework is the cascadable packing/shipping management, which enables regional dissemination of purchase order and shipment aggregation. The feature is enabled by an EPC event interpreter which demands minimal modification to EDI systems. We implemented the framework in an agricultural products commerce system in which the inventory is distributed in multiple farmers and collectors. We confirmed the functionality and performance of the framework through one-months pilot commerce operation with over 150 transactions. We found 54% of the orders involve multiple products and 27% of orders exceeds the shipment free threshold. It was revealed that the regional order dissemination and shipment aggregation function is attractive both to farmers and consumers because we can provide various assortment of regional agricultural products in one commerce site. In addition, we can reduce the shipment cost and shipment labors of farmers by regionally aggregating shipments.