RFID: moving beyond the pilot stage
Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Wal-Mart, Metro Group, Airbus, Hong Kong Airport, Schiphol Airport, Milan Airport, Center Parcs, Flora Holland and logistics firm Alpha Group are all piloting or implementing radio frequency identification (RFID) systems.

They are doing so because the item tracking technology offers the tantalising prospect of revolutionising the management of retail supply chains, delivering effective asset tracking, cutting lost and misplaced baggage at airports, and fighting drug counterfeiting.

RFID has the potential to transform supply chains and offer significant business advantage, but there have been more pilots and trials than full-scale implementations that have been made public. It is important to make this distinction, because a number of organisations have kept their RFID work quiet to give themselves a competitive edge.
From pilot to full roll-out

So what does this say about the overall progress from RFID pilots to full roll-out?

Perhaps, it suggests that some organisations have failed to make a clear business case for RFID, or that RFID has yet to make it on to executives' radar screens as a means of process improvement, better tracking of corporate assets, or a more visible, effective supply chain.

A full-scale RFID roll-out requires significant change management within the organisation, so top-level executive support is needed to give the project clout. This is only possible if the board believes in the project and can see the value of RFID.

"It would cost perhaps £2.5m for a company to invest in RFID for a major implementation. However, if managers can spend £50,000 to make the business case for using RFID, it is much more likely that they can eventually get the £2.5m from the company to deliver a full-scale roll-out," says Jan Poulsen, business development manager at Lyngsoe Systems, which is helping Alpha Group run the logistics infrastructure for the supply of McDonald's restaurants in Europe, and is helping airports install RFID for baggage handling.

David Lyon, EPC global business manager at the UK arm of the GS1 global standards organisation, says pilots should by now have gone beyond the stage of simply trialling the technology.

"Tesco has proved that the technology works with EPC global Class 1, Gen Two tags and readers. The real idea behind pilots should be to see whether RFID can fix what is broken in the supply chain," he says.

GS1 UK wants to get participants on board for a UK pilot of the EPC Information Service (EPCIS), which allows trading partners to manage and exchange RFID-sourced data, such as what, when, where and why, through the supply chain in real-time.

GS1 Germany's RFID Test Centre has played a vital role in Metro Group's comprehensive roll-out plans. Although Metro has been in full roll-out mode at pallet level in its Cash and Carry and Real hypermarkets since the start of the year, the company's Galeria Kaufhof outlet in Essen has only been using RFID in a trial for item tagging since September.

About 30,000 menswear items in Galeria Kaufhof have been RFID tagged, and the store has become a showcase for EPC global standards, including an application-level events standard to pass formatted RFID data to the application layer and EPCIS middleware.

"At Metro Group, we started the introduction of RFID in our process chain in late 2004. Since then we have gained considerable experience with changes in the technology as well as the necessary adaptation of processes," says Gerd Wolfram, managing director of MGI Metro Group IT.

"However, based on our experience with the use of RFID in our supply chain and in front-store applications, we have been able to confirm what we supposed from the very beginning: the matching of user requirements with technology development is pivotal.

"Thus, close collaboration between RFID users and RFID technology providers is the basis upon which one can build a capable RFID system."

RFID at Marks & Spencer

Alongside Metro's implementation, another project that is universally regarded as a business success is Marks & Spencer's development, pilot, and extensive roll out of its Intelligent Label (RFID) project, tagging clothes in its stores.

Intended to guarantee product availability for customers, M&S is rolling out RFID in 120 of its 300 stores. In its spring 2006 pilot - big enough to give M&S management a clear idea of what RFID offered - the company piloted 42 stores in 20 countries, using 15 suppliers.

"You do have to do big pilots to prove big business cases and produce numbers that will impress your board," James Stafford, head of RFID and general merchandise at M&S, told the IDTechEx RFID Europe conference.

M&S is getting its suppliers in Sri Lanka and Turkey to not only attach the tags at the point of manufacture, but to scan the clothes at the start of the supply chain. So, as well as helping to ensure shop-floor availability of products, the company is getting more accurate supply chain matching data.

Andy McBain, Motorola's EMEA senior product marketing manager, who has worked on RFID implementations at airports including Hong Kong, and with the Spanish postal service Correos, says organisations must understand the extra work needed to deliver an RFID roll-out.

"You have to plan your system looking at the wider picture, otherwise you will not know if you will get scalability across 40 distribution centres. You will have to have an open mind on your business case too, because it may not come from what you originally thought.

"You also have to remember to ask your network gurus whether your back-end infrastructure, database and network can cope with all the extra data traffic generated by RFID," he says.

"That is why a major roll-out has to have board-level buy-in, because generating all the extra data may impact your network and consequently your business. You will need a strategic planning team that includes networks and operations specialists, the unions, and a top executive with a business hat on."

The scalability issue is one that worried holiday resort chain Center Parcs, which is planning an RFID roll-out in France. The project, linked to a customer's visitor card, could be used for workforce management. For instance, the system could measure when a customer walked into a store and then track how quickly they were served and whether a sale was made.

Richard Verhoeff, Center Parcs' director of IT services and e-commerce, says, "We were afraid that with so much data, there would be no scalability for the RFID project."

To guarantee scalability, Center Parcs has adopted a Linux-based datawarehouse appliance from Netezza with the capacity for up to 1,000 blades.

Andrew Price, RFID project manager at the International Air Transport Association, has successfully driven the development of a standard for RFID in baggage handling and a business case that says the business could achieve savings of £350m a year from RFID implementation, benefiting airlines, airports and passengers. A string of airports, led by Hong Kong, are proving that the business case works.

Timing is everything

Price says organisations must see the overall benefits of conducting RFID pilots and subsequent implementation.

"One of the important things to understand when doing a pilot is that you want to know what you are going to be doing with the technology, not whether the technology works," says Price.

RFID can generate significant business benefits, but the timing has to be right, and there may be other routes the company can go down to cut costs or improve efficiency. For example, airlines can save themselves millions of pounds by changing aircraft flight paths into airports.

Even at Marks & Spencer, RFID had to wait for its chance, as the company's chief executive, Stuart Rose, said last November when the company announced its 120-store RFID roll-out plans.

"RFID had to sit slightly on the sidelines while other things took priority," he said.

That is perhaps the lesson that many RFID exponents promoting the technology within their organisations have had to learn: understand the right time to move from pilot to roll-out, and be ready to deliver it.

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RFID Tracks Produce From Field to Fork
A U.S. fruit and vegetable supplier is employing EPC tags and interrogators to track its products as they are harvested, processed and transported to retailers, and to trace them back to the source in the event of a recall.
By Claire Swedberg

For the past six months, a U.S. fruit and vegetable producer has been utilizing an RFID-based system to trace the movement of its products as they are harvested and transported to distributors and retailers. The system provides the producer—which has asked to remain unnamed—with data related to farm management and food safety.

To help it turn RFID data into actionable information, the producer is using the GreenTrace Food Safety Solution software platform, developed by InSync Software. InSync also provided system integration services for the deployment. GreenTrace is designed to bring visibility to farm operations, as well as help farm managers determine how long produce spends in any particular location, provide traceability in the case of a recall and analyze operational efficiency. The fresh-food producer is employing EPC Gen 2 RFID tags and interrogators from a variety of vendors.

Typically, farmers of fruits and vegetables keep detailed records of their harvesting processes. Harvesting crews generally fill out paper forms that farmers use to identify each worker, as well as record the state of that person's health and any other details that might affect the products being picked. They then track, on paper, the amount being picked, as well as the field from which the products were harvested and how long the process took.

The GreenTrace system eliminates much of the handwritten portion of that process. Instead of manually recording the time and location when a product is picked, a user can capture that data electronically. In the case of the U.S. produce company, the farm crew applies EPC Gen 2 tags to a combination of corrugated bins, cartons, reusable plastic containers and pallets—all of which can be taken to the field. Each harvester utilizes a GPS-enabled handheld RFID interrogator running InSync software to read the unique tag ID number of a particular container, initiating the picking process. The crew can also enter data into the handheld about the person picking the produce, and when it was harvested.

Once the containers are filled and the pallets loaded, the harvester scans the container tags once more, explains Ravi Panja, InSync's chief technology officer. The handheld interrogator's RFID data, along with its GPS-determined location, is then sent to the company's back-end system via a cellular or satellite communication connection.
When a product arrives at the company's centralized processing plant, it is weighed, cooled and prepared for shipping, with an RFID interrogator recording each step of the process. First, a fixed interrogator at the weigh station captures the container tag's ID number, confirming that the product has been weighed. That ID number, as well as the date, time and weight, is then recorded in the back-end system. A fixed interrogator installed at the cooler's doorway reads the tag again as the container enters and exits the building.

Batches of fruits or vegetables can be processed in a variety of ways. For example, some items might be packaged, such as bagged lettuce, while others might be frozen or sold fresh. The processed produce' packaging is printed with a batch number associated with the RFID tag of the container in which it arrived at the plant. Then, the tag of each container of processed produce is scanned one final time as it is loaded onto a vehicle for transportation to a distribution center or retailer.
To provide a product's status, location and condition, InSync's software processes the tag data, as well as information from the scales and, if applicable, data temperature sensors. While the producer is not currently employing temperature sensors, it says it intends to do so at some point in the future. In that case, the sensor can be wired to the RFID tag on a container, and the system predefined to transmit an alert if the product temperature becomes too warm or cold for its predetermined threshold. If the temperature fluctuates outside of an acceptable range, or if a product spends too much time outside the cooler, an alert can be triggered and sent to production managers via e-mail.

The system is configurable to monitor temperatures or the time a product spends waiting outside a cooler, says Yashpaul Dogra, InSync's VP of marketing, because details such as how long a product can remain in storage, or at what temperature it must be kept, vary according to the product itself. "If you're doing berries versus leafy greens," Dogra states, "there will be a differentiation between how [the system] should be configured."

In the event of contamination, the producer can use the GreenTrace system to trace an affected product down to the exact GPS-determined field location at which it was picked. For example, a contaminated bag of lettuce could be traced back to the specific container from which the lettuce was taken prior to packaging. A retail store determines the batch number of the contaminated product and notifies the producer. The producer then accesses the GreenTrace application, locates the RFID tag ID numbers of all bins and other containers that contained produce from that particular batch, and traces the contaminated product back to the first read of its bin on the field. This enables the producer to ascertain where the product may have been, and to identify any other products that might have been in the same location at the same time.

The producer can also use the system to track the volume of products being harvested, and send notification down the supply chain to better prepare transporters, distributors and retailers about the volume of product they can expect to arrive. Better preparation can help reduce the risk of spoilage that can occur due to a bottleneck in the supply chain when unexpectedly high volumes catch operators in that chain by surprise.
"The overall goal is to bring visibility to activities that currently can't be captured," Dogra explains. That visibility is more critical with fresh produce than in other industries, since a product can begin to degrade as soon as it is harvested, and any unnecessary transportation delays or temperature fluctuations can destroy it.

Earlier this year, in response to reports of illness stemming from food contamination, producers created a marketing plan known as the California Leafy Green Handler Marketing Agreement, which was approved by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA). The initiative is intended to standardize leafy green vegetable production to address contamination issues. GreenTrace, says Tim Short, InSync's VP of sales, was designed to help growers follow those guidelines.
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RFID Journal LIVE! Canada to Host Special RFID Seminar for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Sponsored by the Government of Ontario

This special seminar, "RFID Technology: Small Investment for Big Benefits," will be held on November 26, 2007 at the Toronto Congress Centre, to help educate small and medium-sized Canadian enterprises about how they can use EPC/RFID technologies to remain competitive.

New York, NY and Toronto, ON (PRWEB) November 15, 2007 -- RFID Journal, the world's leading media and events company covering Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and GS1 Canada, Canada's expert in collaborative commerce and global standards, today announced that the Government of Ontario is sponsoring a special seminar at RFID Journal LIVE! Canada entitled: "RFID Technology: Small Investment for Big Benefits".

The second annual RFID Journal LIVE! Canada, a premier RFID conference and exhibition, is co-produced by RFID Journal and EPCglobal Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of GS1 Canada, will be held November 26-28 at the Toronto Congress Centre. The seminar for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), will be held on November 26 and is designed to help companies understand how Electronic Product Code™/Radio Frequency Identification (EPC/RFID) technology can help them boost efficiencies and enhance their competitiveness.

Companies that attend the seminar will learn:
-- The fundamentals of RFID technology
-- EPC standards and how they create value for retailers and suppliers
-- Real-world implementation issues and how to overcome them
-- How to tag goods for retail customers
-- How to associate EPCs with products and generate advance shipping notices automatically
-- How SMEs can achieve a positive ROI from RFID
-- How to use EPCglobal Network standards to share data with supply chain partners

"We are very excited to be able to offer SMEs, with the support of the Government of Ontario, the help and expertise necessary to increase their opportunities in emerging information and communications technologies (ICT)," said N. Arthur Smith, CEO, EPCglobal Canada.

RFID Journal LIVE! Canada features three educational tracks--Supply Chain/Inventory Management, Retail and Manufacturing/Operations. The event also features two preconference seminars, in addition to the SME seminar, including, "RFID Journal University-An Introduction to RFID", and "RFID's Role in Improving Hospital Operations", an educational seminar to help healthcare providers understand how RFID can improve efficiencies and patient safety in hospitals and clinics.

The educational program at RFID Journal LIVE! Canada includes new case studies and objective end-user presentations from companies benefiting from EPC/RFID today, including: Aquaduct, Bell Canada, Boeing, BP, Cami Automotive Inc., CVRD Inco Inc., Dollar Chest, Eminencia, Logistic Consulting and Technologies, Endwave Corporation Defense and Securities Division, Hamilton Health Sciences, Handleman Company, Kimberly-Clark, Loblaw Companies Limited, McKesson, Nav-Aids, Wegmans Food Markets, Société des alcools du Québec, Staples Business Depot Canada Ltd., Tejas Tubular Products, The Heart Hospital, The Hospital for Sick Children, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

"RFID Journal has always been committed to providing the highest quality information about EPC/RFID, and helping companies understand the benefits of these technologies is a big part of that," said Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal. "RFID Journal Canada features the most end-user presentations by companies doing business in Canada and has the largest exhibit floor where Canadian companies can meet local vendors that will help them deploy applications."

For more information or to register for the event, please visit: www.rfidjournalevents.com/livecanada

About RFID Journal:
RFID Journal is the leading source of news and in-depth information about Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and its many business applications. Business executives and implementers depend on RFID Journal for up-to-the-minute RFID news, in-depth case studies, best practices, strategic insights and information about vendor solutions. This has made RFID Journal the most relied-upon and respected RFID information resource, serving the largest audience of RFID decision-makers worldwide--in print, online and at face-to-face events. For more information, visit www.rfidjournal.com.

About EPCglobal Canada:
EPCglobal Canada is a wholly owned subsidiary of GS1 Canada, the not-for-profit, industry-led GS1 member organization that promotes and maintains global standards for the identification of goods. EPCglobal Canada holds the exclusive rights to assign Electronic Product Code™ (EPC) numbers, which will allow Canadian companies to better manage their supply chains from beginning to end, resulting in an increase in productivity and profit. In addition, EPCglobal Canada supports pilot testing, and implementation of products and services related to Electronic Product Code™/Radio Frequency Identification (EPC/RFID) technology, including certification and compliance testing. For more information, visit www.gs1ca.org. www.prweb.com/

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