Integrating Technologies Are Needed to Assure Safety of Nation's Shores

Companies that ship goods into the country need government guidance to identify relatively inexpensive technologies to help secure American ports, a group of manufacturers, tech companies, and experts said last week. Participants in a Unisys-sponsored supply-chain security event in New York mostly agreed that U.S. businesses must stop looking at security as a burdensome expense and better understand costs tied to potential security failures. "The lack of sharing of information among [supply-chain] parties is the greatest area of vulnerability," said CEO Rick Kessler of cargo software maker Horizon Services Group.

Attendees couldn't identify one single technology that would solve supply-chain security problems but said wares such as radio-frequency identification tags will be most effective when used with other technologies, such as global-positioning systems that can track container locations and electronic label seals that indicate a container's contents and whether they have been tampered with. "It's the system," said Unisys president Joe McGrath, "not the system's components, that solves the problem."