Shipment Information Sharing Services

The effectiveness of a supply chain depends to a large degree on the use of technology to facilitate the sharing of information and to conduct business transactions. Due to globalization exchange of supply chain data across organizations is becoming ever more important; and data must be integrated that is created and owned by multiple parties. To give some examples, product master data as well as data on individual product instances or on outgoing shipments is provided by a manufacturer or exporter. Purchase order data and information on received shipments is captured by an importer. Transportation data such as location or temperature history and evidence of container integrity is gathered by a logistics provider. Customs declarations and acknowledgement are held by customs organizations, and so forth.

At the same time RFID tags are changing the way businesses track goods on item, carton, and pallet level throughout their supply chains. Container monitoring devices are emerging, making global shipping more predictable and more secure.

Out of political and data privacy reasons, as well as due to complexity there cannot be one single central database holding all this data.

Shipment Information Sharing Services (SISS) is a platform that enables efficient and secure data sharing and business choreography between trading partners. Information shared through SISS may include details on container content, environmental data collected during a shipment, location history and door open events, corresponding purchase orders, freight invoices, bills of lading, and any other relevant shipment data.

The SISS project is a collaboration between IBM's Global Business Services (GBS), IBM's Secure Trade Lane organization, IBM's SME (Subject Matter Experts) in Transportation and Logistics, IBM Software Group (SWG) and IBM Almaden Research.

Team: Karin Murthy, Tyrone Grandison.

Public Collateral

• SISS Presentation Slides
• SISS AutoTech Demo