RFID passes demonstrator test

Released in July at GS1’s Impetus 2006 conference, the report outlines the many benefits of RFID and the use of the EPC Network in the supply chain, and not just for retailers’ benefit.

Fiona Wilson, general manager standards development with GS1, described the project as a huge success. “We (participants) learnt a lot from the project that will be passed on to Australian industry. Now we want as many people as possible in industry to read the report and learn from it.

“With 13 organisations and seven live sites, we did what we wanted to do; to take RFID out of concept and practically apply it,” Wilson told Manufacturers’ Monthly.

“While the RFID focus has often been on retailers, with cost savings there, the reality is they are not using it at retail POS (point of sale). They are using it within their supply chain to monitor the flow of their items. So if you are a retailer or a manufacturer, it’s the same,” Wilson said.

“The big thing for us was the benefit of having standard interfaces…a key learning. When we started close to 18 months ago, some of the interface standards were not there yet, meaning we were restricted to the type of equipment, software and hardware we could choose.

“We needed to ensure they would be interoperable with other levels of the network and that wasn’t always the case. In the old world of RFID and networks, not everyone’s systems talked to everyone else.

“There was a lot of time wasted in trying to marry things together. Whereas what we are trying to do with the network is not to worry whose reader, middleware or database you have; they will all talk to each other.”

“It proves that all the work we have been doing with the standards is of real value to companies. It opens up the choices of equipment and reduces the amount of time to actually marry those things together,” she said.

Asset tracking

According to Wilson, asset tracking was a clear winner in the project. “We spoke to a number of organisations about issues with their supply chain, and asset tracking is a real pain point for a lot of people as it’s very costly and timely to keep track of your assets.

“A lot of companies don’t do it because of the amount of time it takes for someone to count assets. But by attaching the RFID tags and driving it through a portal you actually capture the trade items, the unit load as well as the asset with no manual intervention.

“Clearly that gives you the ability to track another level of items that you currently don’t do with bar coding solutions. Bar coding could be done, but it is very labour intensive,” Wilson said.

“A lot of suppliers write off a lot of money for assets that they can’t track. They think it’s somewhere in the supply chain or they had it at one point in the supply chain, but don’t know where it has gone now.

“Returnable assets are a real pain. If you can track them just by attaching a RFID tag with no other steps, then that can be effective,” Wilson said.

Murray Fane, IT manager Asia Pacific with Chep, and one of the 13 members of the consortium, was impressed with the technology to track such low cost items as the humble pallet.

“The project has shown how shared tracking from the start to the end of the supply chain, can provide information that can be used by all parties to improve delivery efficiency,” he said.

The EPC code used was a GRAI (Global Returnable Asset Identifier) which identifies each individual pallet.

Fane said it was clear early on there was a need to match read events with planned events. “We needed to know not only where a pallet was read, but where it should have been read.

“We realised that, through centrally available shared data, we could get real time information of a pallet’s location, which door it passes through, exactly when it arrives at its destination and what it is carrying.

“This opens up the possibility of real time tracks and trace with our pallets and the goods travelling on them.

“Once norms are established, we can set up alerts when deliveries do not arrive as expected, or we can use estimated delivery dates and times as the trigger.

“Alerts will be real-time, which allows managers to deal with issues as they arise as opposed to days or weeks later.” Fane said.

Wilson said there is no timeline for phase two of the demonstrator project at this stage. “We might announce it later this year or early next, but not necessarily with the same 13 companies. We want to look at other business cases besides the FMCG supply chain, as the benefits are not restricted to just FMCG.

“We will use Gen 2 next phase. Its performance is far superior to Gen 1. It’s far more reliable, eliminating ghost reads, but at the time we started the project, there was no Gen 2 technology on the market, and we didn’t want to swap over half way through the pilot.

“Really we weren’t testing the effectiveness of the technology, but more demonstrating the principle of the network.

“Now we understand how it works, what sort of areas could we use it in, the next phase will be taking those things that came out of phase one and trying to apply them into a phase two, in a more detailed and structured way,” Wilson said.

For more information call GS1 on 03 9558 9559 or visit www.gs1au.org.