A2B hosted a well-attended Executive Breakfast during the Forum. At that meeting I drew a parallel between two waves of bar code, the older UPC and the newer IUID. The former undeniably revolutionized the grocery and general retail supply chain by enabling tighter inventory control, instant price look-up, automatic product resupply, product batch and lot traceability, efficient item return processing and last but not least, in excess of billions of dollars in cost savings annually.
The latter has extraordinary potential to revolutionize the DoD supply chain and logistics by maximizing warfighter readiness while minimizing costs. IUID enables critical asset management, clean audit and FIAR compliance, anti-counterfeit assurance, rapid asset deployment, total asset visibility and significant budget savings estimated at $3 billion to $5 billion annually. The technology force multiplier that has emerged over the past few years has created some exciting opportunities for asset control by leveraging ubiquitous mobility, internet connectivity, and authentication technology. Distributed connection devices as common as smartphones can now be used to perform data capture at the point of the activities.
IUID and the technology force multiplier effect are coming together to gather data and turn it into meaningful information for smart, cost-saving decision making. Once IUID is fully implemented across the services, and potential efficiencies are utilized, I have little doubt the cost savings will dwarf those realized by the grocery and retail industries.
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