Oracle Helps Schenker become a Real-Time Enterprise
By integrating global RFID data with existing business applications using Oracle technologies, Germany-based logistics provider Schenker has gained a single, hosted, infrastructure providing global connectivity of RFID devices and the flexibility to address future business demands.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) holds the promise of revolutionizing the supply chain. By integrating real world data about physical assets with information systems, companies can more accurately track assets, monitor key performance indicators and automate business processes.
For logistics providers, RFID not only gives them greater visibility into their operations thus allowing them to make better decisions based on real-time information, but it can benefit their customers as well through improved service and response times. Schenker, one of the world's leading providers of integrated logistics services, realised that in order to stay ahead of its competition it needed to respond to changing business events in real-time and to aggressively seek ways of exploiting this emerging technology.
With annual sales of 8.9 billion euros, 42,000 employees and about 1,100 offices around the world, Schenker is one of the world's leading providers of integrated logistics services, offering land operations, air and sea freight as well as comprehensive logistics solutions and global supply chain management from a single source. Schenker is a part of DB Logistics, the Transportation and Logistics Division of Deutsche Bahn AG.
"We realised that we needed to develop top-drawer RFID-based solutions in order to improve the service we could give our customers," said Dr. Helmut Faerber, Senior Vice President Corporate IT Management, Schenker AG, Essen. "Within our global supply chain, our goal was to be able to connect any type of device to any type of logistics application in any location using a single, centralised infrastructure."
In order to achieve this goal, Schenker turned to Oracle for both business partnership and technology solutions. Oracle teamed up with T-Systems as the hosting partner and TBN, a local RFID system integration company, to design a solution to address Schenker's needs. For the first phase, this team implemented a centralized RFID event monitoring infrastructure using the Oracle SOA Suite with integration to the existing SAP Logistics Execution System. RFID data is captured and filtered by Oracle Sensor Edge Server and dispatched back to a central data repository. The workflow to deal with the incoming data is orchestrated by Oracle BPEL Process Manager. This solution gives Schenker the means to showcase their RFID-capabilities to customers and can scale to eventually tag and track thousands of pallets and other units.
"With the help of the Oracle platform we have implemented, we are now able to provide Schenker's diverse, global service areas with a consistent infrastructure," continued Dr. Faerber. "This means that we can react dynamically and flexibly to future process and customer requirements."
Based upon the success of the initial work, Schenker is now looking at a number of other RFID related projects, including trailer-tracking for Schenker's internal operations and the usage of the technology in the area of sea-freight containers
In addition, both Schenker and Oracle are driving the standardization of RFID in the market and are members of the standards organisations EPC Global and GS1 Germany.
