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Austroads supply chain visibility report released

Industry has welcomed the launch of the Austroads Research Report AP-R538-17 – Investigating the Potential Benefits of Enhanced End to End Supply Chain Visibility. The report examines the benefits of using end-to-end supply chain visibility technologies using GS1 global data standards (GDS) in real-time industry pilots.
Federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester said: “The report involved several major pilot studies examining how the adoption of visibility technologies, using global data standards, enables all stakeholders in a supply chain to keep track of freight,” said Mr Chester.
Participating in a panel of experts at the event, Bonnie Ryan, senior manager – trade, transport & heavy industry at GS1 Australia said the report concludes an extensive body of work conducted by GS1 Australia.
“The industry pilots were across three logistics supply chains operated by Toll Group, Arrium OneSteel and Nestlé. The aim of the pilots was to continue the investigation of end-to-end supply chain visibility improvements on intermodal transport corridors using the comprehensive GS1 standards toolkit, including common freight identification and labelling, transport electronic data interchange (EDI) messaging and “EPCIS” – the GS1 event-based traceability standard for capturing real-time activity along multi-leg and/or multi-carrier transport journeys.”
“GS1 standards enable information on freight, transport equipment and events along supply chains to be identified and shared among different parties and service providers. Based on the pilot findings using GS1 standards, the economic benefit to the Australian transport and logistics sector could exceed $1 billion,” added Ms Ryan.
The project also assessed the challenges associated with implementing a common standard across SME supply chain partners who were operating different information management systems with varying degrees of complexity.
The intermodal visibility pilots demonstrated that the use of global data standards would result in real-time visibility across multiple modes in the supply chain, improve interoperability across service providers with a common tracking identifier, and increase productivity and reduce costs in the end-to-end supply chain.
David McNeil, e-commerce manager at OneSteel said: “It’s great to see the work that we’ve done at OneSteel has been recognised. It’s been great for our business and we look forward to the standards getting wider adoption in the industry.”
Peter Carney, head of strategy and development at Toll Customised Solutions said: “The benefit of GS1 standards is that once goods are despatched to end customers, we can see how these goods are moving through the transport chain and if need be, intervene much earlier because we have visibility”.
GS1 Australia has a major role to play to influence, lead and encourage the Australian transport & logistics sector to adopt the use of GS1 standards for end-to-end supply chain visibility.
The Austroads Research Report AP-R538-17 – Investigating the Potential Benefits of Enhanced End to End Supply Chain Visibility is now available for downloading.
 
 

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