Procter & Gamble has a straightforward goal—remove half the time and half the inventory from its supply chain. That would knock 70 days out of the time it takes to get Downy fabric softener or Bounty paper towels onto store shelves. It would also remove several steps from the supply chain, bringing P&G, its warehouses and retailers much closer together.

Getting there, says Stephen David, chief information officer and business-to-business officer at the consumer goods giant, will require databases with 24/7 access to key players in the supply chain. He described it as "globally standard product information when you want it," in his keynote talk at Frontline Solutions Supply Chain Week.

David also went on to say "this is about the network. It's not about individual (data capture) technologies." And a walk around exhibitors of automatic data capture (ADC) technologies at Frontline Solutions supported his comments. While suppliers were talking up the latest features in hardware from bar code scanners to radio frequency identification systems, the feature most emphasized was connectivity.

Here are just four examples. Symbol Technologies (www.symbol.com) introduced a family of scanners that "supports every major method of interface connectivity." Intermec (www.intermec.com) introduced wireless printers that connect to central databases by radio frequency rather than wired connections. Over at LXE (www.lxe.com), new wireless terminals with Windows CE, instead of proprietary operating systems, were part of the trend toward improved connectivity. And at Matrics' (www.matricsrfid.com) booth, the talk was about a new radio frequency identification (RFID) system that reads up to 1,000 tags of data a second, downloading a pallet load of data to a centralized database.

P&G's David foresees RFID tags "for every item, for every can of soda." Data about the location of each item would be available in real time, allowing greater control over its movement and thus removing inventory from the supply chain.

With that in mind, an MIT pilot program with P&G and others is underway to track inventory through live supply chains at the pallet, case and item level. "We need to start to work toward what's possible, not just what's practical," David says.