1.5 Billion Events a week - a statistical assessment for smart transport items in German FMCG supply chains

Abstract

This paper is based on the research project smaRTI which is an acronym for smart reusable transport items. The project started in July 2010 and ended December 2013. One of the core ideas of the project is to use smart reusable transport items with automatic identification technology such as barcode or RFID in order to generate events, at different capture points in the supply chain of the companies. An example for a typical event, based on the GS1 EPCIS standard, would be "shipping" after an order has been dispatched. The events are uploaded in a cloud based data storage, where all of the project partners are able to monitor them in real time. This paper explains how to gross up data volume caused by around 600 relevant transport items in 34 weeks of the pilot to the fast moving consumer goods (short: FMCG) industry in Germany. It describes the strategy and the used statistical methods for the extrapolation and explains the results.