1945 - L'eon Theremin invents an espionage tool that retransmits incident radio waves with audio information - a very early predecessor to RFID technology.
1948 - The 1948 Berlin Airlift, which involved co-ordinating air freighted consignments of food and consumables that arrived with differing manifests, languages and numbers of copies, prompts the development of a standard manifest - an early ancestor of electronic data interchange (EDI).
1949 - Graduate students Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver file a patent application for their "Classifying Apparatus and Method", designed to allow product information to be automatically read at a check-out counter.
1960s - Electronic transmission of data commences, at first in the rail and road transport sectors.
1966 - Bar code is used commercially for the first time in the US.
1968 - The US Transportation Data Co-ordinating Committee (TDCC) is formed to co-ordinate the development of translation rules among four existing sets of industry-specific standards. The X12 standards of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) gradually extend and replace these.
1968 - The UK Department of Customs and Excise develops standards for documents used in international trade: Tradacoms. These are later extended by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) into the GDTI.
1970 - The Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC) is written by Logicon. Monarch Marking produces bar code equipment for retail trade use and Plessey Telecommunications produces equipment for industrial use.
1973 - Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory performs the first demonstration of reflected power (backscatter) RFID tags.
1973 - George J Laurer develops the Universal Product Code. It becomes widely used in the US and Canada for items in stores and replaces UGPIC.
1981 - The first set of interchange rules is developed and published by the UNECE Working Party on Facilitation of International Trade Procedures. "Guidelines for Trade Data Interchange" (GTDI) offers potential users a basis for developing systems.
1984 - Crafted With Pride is formed in the USA by the US apparel industry in response to intense competition in the industry worldwide.
Kurt Salmon and Associates is commissioned a year later by the group to conduct a supply chain analysis. As a result of the study the industry adopts the Universal Product Code and a set of standards for electronic data interchange.
1986 - The Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Standards Association (VICS) is formed.
1990s - The Quick Response strategy emerges as a technological solution to support SCM efforts.
1993 - The Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) movement begins in the US. It signals the emergence of new principles of collaborative management along the supply chain.
1996 - The Supply-Chain Operations Reference-model (SCOR), a cross-industry standard diagnostic tool, is developed.
1997 - The Supply Chain Council is formed as a result.
1997 - A VICS sub-committee develops Collaborative Planning, Forecasting & Replenishment (CPFR) - a standard intended to assist industry to collaborate on SCM using standard formats.
1998 - Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, which provides a text-based means to describe and apply a tree-based structure to information, becomes a WC3 recommendation.
2001 - The first CPFR rollout takes place.
Sources: Supply Chain Options for Biobased Businesses - Rhonda R Lummus, Associate Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Iowa State University. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI): An Introduction, by Roger Clarke, Principal, Xamax Consultancy, Canberra. ECR SA (http://www.ecr-sa.co.za/). Palmer, Jonathan W, and M Lynne Markus. 2000 - The Performance Impact of Quick Response and Strategic Alignment in Specialty Retailing, Information Systems Research, 11, 3 (September): 241-259. wikipedia.org, inventors.about.com, www.vics.org, whatis.com.
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