International Supply Chain Standards Approved

An international panel recently approved new standards for visibility within supply chains.

GS1, a neutral, non-profit standards organization based in Belgium, authored both the EPICS and Core Business Vocabulary standards.

Both were ratified by a joint committee of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, GS1 announced Tuesday.

The EPICS standard allows businesses to capture and share information about movement within a supply chain, while the CBV standard provides a uniform vocabulary for supply chain analysis.

Read more: Three ways to gain full visibility and control of supply chain operations.

EPICS, first approved in 2007, particularly improved tracking in the food and health care sectors and ensured better security and regulatory compliance. In the pharmaceutical industry, the standard helped dramatically reduce opportunities for undetected counterfeiting.

“We are seeing EPCIS emerge as a way to reliably document chain of custody and chain of ownership," said Scott Mooney of San Francisco-based McKesson Pharmaceutical. "Such information trails are mandatory in a growing number of regulatory jurisdictions, as they help prevent counterfeits from entering legitimate supply chains."

The joint panel's approval officially establishes the GS1 measures as ISO and IEC standards, which will help government and industry regulators, as well as software providers, incorporate them across global trade networks.