ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews five technologies that are likely to cause large changes to the domain of supply chain visibility. The technologies reviewed here are in the proof of concept or ramp-up phase as of 2013, so they should see earlyadopter usage by 2016 and widespread usage by 2020. That timeline makes them perfect candidates for discussion here, because the feasibility of the technologies is already proven and while the costs or scalability are being optimized it is up to the supply chain practitioner community to decide how they are used. With these technologies, there really are no best practices (yet), but by the end of the decade there will be. Of course, some of them may never become widely adopted, either because a reliable usage pattern never emerges or because newer technologies leap-bound them the way wireless networks leaped landline telephony in much of the world. But there is a high probability that most or all of them will achieve widespread use and therefore radically alter supply chain visibility as it is practiced today.
