UID Overview Series – Part III – The Future of UID

This is the third post of our three-part series that focuses on the history of UID, the current state of the mandate, and what to expect for the future. Part III highlights the future of UID and MIL-STD-130. For more information, click the links for Part I and Part II.

The IUID Vision Going Forward

The vision for IUID is that DoD, its international partners, and industry will efficiently and effectively manage assets with a capabilities-based, common framework in acquisition, engineering, supply, transportation, and maintenance management processes, where this management is enabled by a data-driven environment encompassing: (a) the use of globally unique UIIs, (b) speedy and accurate automatic identification and data capture (AIDC), (c) electronic data interchange (EDI) transactions, (d) an IUID Registry that provides the single point of reference for UII pedigree data, and (e) the use of the concatenated UII as a common key for accessing information on assets in business, warfighter, intelligence and information management environment transactions and databases.
The value proposition for this vision is that resources invested in (a) placing machine-readable UIIs on items qualifying for IUID, and (b) providing an AIDC infrastructure for reading the UII marks, will provide investment returns through enhanced asset management processes. Investments are required to mark the items, register their pedigree data in the IUID Registry, collect intelligence on these marked items as they are exposed to various supply chain events through use of AIDC equipment and EDI transactions, and store this intelligence keyed to the concatenated UIIs in the AISs supporting supply chain management processes. Thus, a valuable store of item-by-item history information can be accessed by their concatenated UIIs and shared among the supply chain management participants.
Continued IUID implementation will provide enhancements to several core supply chain management competencies. Asset tracking will extend the ability of the warfighter by providing asset visibility any time or place. Enhanced logistics and engineering analysis will facilitate an increase in weapon system availability. Accurate asset valuation will correctly indicate the Department’s financial position. Enhanced supply chain management tools will assist in reducing weapon system sustainment costs. AIDC will vastly improve data accuracy and reduce tracking efforts. IUID will be the catalyst for Department-wide improvements in maintenance, safety, logistics, and financial management.
In the short-term, marking items and electronically submitting the data on deliverables through iRAPT (formerly WAWF) will allow both industry and the government to improve data quality.  Concurrently, the use of IUID data within and across the acquisition, finance and logistics communities will enable IUID marking and data capture to contribute to functional processes.  In the long-term IUID will become a key factor in all accountability and accounting systems.
That concludes our three-part series on UID. If you have questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. You can also Ask an Expert for more specific UID policy questions, or check out our durable UID Labels page.