by Carrie Wen on 25 October 2011

An EPCglobal T&L Workshop was successfully held by GS1 Taiwan on Oct. 17th to 18th, 2011. It contained one and half days meeting and a live demo of green channel at Tao Yuan International Airport. This event was supported by General Directorate of Customs, Taiwan government. Delegates from GS1 Global Office, GS1 Japan, GS1 Hong Kong, GS1 Korea and GS1 Malaysia all eye-witnessed the real eSeal implementation on Customs operation and had experience sharing on T&L industry.

In the meeting, Shirley Arsenault of the Global Office presented the current key issues of T&L group, such as T&L Strategy, eCom Logistics standards in XML, Activities with WCO & UPU and Marketing EPCIS. In addition, GS1 Asia MOs and T&L members share their update of activities in the meeting. Through the discussion and experience sharing, all the information was collected which is for GS1/EPCglobal’s reference.

•  GS1 Japan: The development of Supply Chain Visibility via APEC initiative
•  GS1 Hong Kong: Hong Kong T & L Update - Supply Chain Visibility
•  GS1 Malaysia and Smartag Co.: Royal Malaysian Customs RFID Security and Trade Facilitation project - Driving adoption of eSeal and EPCIS ; Malaysia/Thailand Cross Boarder overland container Track and Trace commercial implementation - Successful adoption of eSeal and EPCIS
•  GS1 Taiwan: Update of eSeal progress in Taiwan
•  NYK: New manufactured vehicles visibility in the supply chain

The new progress of eSeal project in Taiwan is the active eSeal adoption on green channel. This active system contains battery and with several functions, such as GPS and 3G in order to track and trace and monitor the transshipped containers in a close loop scenario. At present Taiwan Customs adopted active eSeal on two green channels, which are between two sea ports and at the airport. Keelung Customs office operates one of these two channels to monitor the movement of transshipment containers between the Port of Taipei and Keelung Harbor.

Another channel is operated by Taipei Customs Office to monitor the movement of the air cargos between the airport and Ever terminal where are the restricted area and warehouse. On 18th, EPCglobal T&L group eye-witnessed this green channel at the airport. This system demonstrated how to collect the information during the physical movement of the containers, including devices monitoring, real time warning & alarm, travel monitor, synchronized display of comparison results of RFID lanes, container status from Customs clearance systems and instant log of container notes.

Active eSeal system here is comprised of active eSeal reader, active eSeal and back-end system. As the consideration of environmental protection, active eSeals are reusable and its batteries are rechargeable.

Both active eSeal and passive eSeal system are the parts of “Cross-border movement security – eSeal monitoring system”. It utilized ICT and RFID technology to achieve the effective control mechanism on the movement of the transshipped container and in line with the policy of the container’s safety initiated by WCO.