Roadmap to tracking based business and intelligent products

Item-centric tracking is an opportunity to increase visibility and control in different operations of a company. The economical feasibility of item-centric tracking is based on recent technological developments for monitoring the material flow on the item-level instead of the material type-level. It enables companies to track and trace assets over their lifecycle and manage supply chain operations across organizational boundaries. However, the challenge in practice is to find the right areas to start the development of business applications. In this viewpoint paper a means-ends framework for introducing item-centric tracking in business is proposed based on realized track and trace cases. Based on the framework a roadmap for introducing tracking in businesses operations is outlined. The proposed roadmap circumvents the most challenging business cases for introducing tracking and RFID-technology in the supply chain and focuses on asset management as a more accessible route for business.