New ISO RFID standard will help trace products in the supply chain

For reasons of safety and reliability, the importance of being able to trace products throughout the supply chain has strongly increased in recent years. The new ISO 17367:2009 standard will help manufacturers and distributors to track products and to manage their traceability thanks to standardized RF tags.

Traceability is defined as the tracking and tracing of product and information related to it at each stage of a chain of production, processing, distribution, and selling. The development of radio frequency identification (RFID), including peripheral devices and their applications, is indispensable for increasing the safety and reliability of products for consumers.

ISO 17367:2009, Supply chain applications of RFID – Product tagging, defines the basic features of RFID for use in the supply chain when applied to product tagging. In particular it makes recommendations for:

• encoded identification of the product;

• additional information about the product for inclusion on the RFID tag;

• semantics and data syntax;

• the data protocol to be used to interface with business applications and the RFID system;

• the air interface standards between the RFID interrogator and RFID tag.

ISO 17367:2009 is applicable to a wide range of industries and it has been elaborated in order to ensure compatibility at the physical, command and data levels with four other International Standards under the general title: Supply chain applications of RFID.