Client
Our client is a supermarket chain, offering a wide range of products including groceries, household items, electronics, clothing, and more. In addition to physical stores, they also provide online shopping opportunities through website and mobile applications.
Challenge
The client followed EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) standard, which is a global standard for sharing and exchanging information about the movement and status of products within the supply chain.
The client needed software that would track products from manufacturer or supplier to the points of sale and ensure overall compliance with the latest version of EPCIS standard.
Project Description
Before the development, our team conducted a thorough study of EPCIS standard, and based on this, we developed a supply chain traceability system, that was functionally splitted in four parts:
Capture service
It's an API that works with EPCIS events, which are standardized messages used in supply chain and logistics management to communicate information about the movement and status of products tagged with RFID or other types of identifiers. For example, ID of the item, package type, warehouse, store location, status of the item (e.g. arrived, in transportation, etc), quality inspection results, and so on.
Capture service ingests EPCIS events data in one of the two formats – XML or JSON, and then validates this data in accordance with EPCIS standard and the client internal regulations to establish consistent formats, structures, and protocols for further data communication and analysis.
Callback service
It is a Windows service that is used to communicate the data, previously collected and standardized by the Capture service, between all supply chain stakeholders: retail stores, stocks, office departments, concrete employees, manufacturers, suppliers, etc. Before sending, the data gets organized via predefined rules to ensure the right piece of data reaches the right people in the right time.
Query service
This API is used to manually acceess the data on all supply chain events, which was saved via Caprture service, to enable manual oversight and selective data extraction via User Interface.
User Interface
It’s a user-friendly front-end, which employees use to:
- Monitor all supply chain events, get notified on errors and fix them.
- Filter and group events by entity, for example, concrete store, stock, or department.
- Set up email auto sending for some events or event combinations.
- See statistics and create visualized reports.
Key Features
Tracking of the whole supply chain process to ensure EPCIS compliance.
Standardization of data in accordance with EPCIS standard.
Alerting on errors and underperformance to proactively fix all issues that may lead to non-compliance with EPCIS standard.
Rule-based data communication between retail and logistics stakeholders, including email auto sending.
Supply chain events statistics and ability to create visualized reports.
User-friendly interface to enable human oversight and control.
Team Composition & Project Duration
The team completed this project in 1,5 years, and comprised:
1 Lead Developer
2 Full-stack developers
Major Tech Stack
Angular 13, .Net, EF Core, Dapper, MSSQL, Cosmos DB, MongoDB, Azure DevOps, Visual Studio, VS Code, SQL Server Management Studio
Results
We have built the Supply Chain Traceability System that ensures the compliance with the latest version of EPCIS standard, based on predefined rules of data management and supply chain movements.
The UI of the system was subsequently integrated into other client systems, for example, stock management and product catalog to simplify and accelerate the processes of monitoring, filtering data, setting up notifications, and generating reports.
Before implementation of the system, the client could process only 100K supply chain events per hour, while after the implementation it reached 2 million, which means 20K times performance increase.
