EPCIS & CBV

EPCIS is GS1's flagship data sharing standard for enabling visibility, within organisations as well as across an entire supply chain of trading partners and other stakeholders. It helps provide the “what, when, where, why and how” of products and other assets, enabling the capture and sharing of interoperable information about status, location, movement and chain of custody.

The Core Business Vocabulary (CBV) is a companion standard which provides definitions of data values that may be used to populate the data structures defined in the EPCIS standard.

GS1 recognises the constant evolution of business requirements and of the technologies businesses everywhere have come to rely upon. EPCIS supports industry in providing additional transparency about the things they manufacture and distribute. As industry continues its digital transformation to more sustainable and circular supply chains, GS1 has answered this need with improvements to EPCIS. Trading partners now have a standardised method of including sensor data and product and process certifications in their event messages – further enabling use of a common language between systems that must communicate effectively. 

EPCIS / CBV 2.0 represents a major update that provides many new features, and is designed to lower adoption hurdles for businesses and developers. The latest release of EPCIS includes features that enable industry to generate additional value from supply chain events and technical enablers that match the pace of innovations in data sharing.

EPCIS / CBV 2.0 adds support for:

• Sensor data for monitoring the condition of assets (e.g., in cold chains) and industrial IoT processes
• Certification details pertaining to products, organisations and locations
• Linked, browsable online definitions for all event data fields and classes, code lists and values 
• JSON / JSON-LD syntax which is developer-friendly
• REST API for capture and query of event data, easing integration of EPCIS into evolving applications
• GS1 Digital Link URI syntax to express GS1 identifiers within EPCIS event data

Business Benefits

EPCIS is a traceability event messaging standard that enables supply chain visibility through sharing event data using a common language across, between and within enterprises. EPCIS 2.0 supports existing and emerging industry use cases for traceability and supply chain visibility, providing such information as:

• Whereabouts of products produced at or shipped from a given facility, to support tracking and tracing
• Aggregation of individual items packed into cases, cases loaded onto pallets, pallets into containers
• Timestamped series of business-relevant sensor data (e.g., for critical mechanical components or in temperature-controlled transports)
• Details on measured concentrations of chemicals and microorganisms, for food safety applications
• Accurate overview of product inventory or equipment availability across networks of distributed locations
• Expiration of perishable assets (e.g., vaccines) to ensure timely use and first-in/first-out distribution
• Certification details associated with harvest, production, shipments and locations, such as reduction of carbon emissions or efficient use of water and land