It’s all about compliance at CHEP
RFID-enabled pallets from CHEP enable compliance with Wal-Mart mandates.
By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 1/26/2007
Nearly eight years ago, CHEP began running pilot programs with the RFID labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to track its pool of 75 million pallets with RFID tags.
Today, CHEP is still providing pallets with RFID tags under a program known as PLUS ID. “But now it’s all about the needs of our customers,” says Per Ohstrom, director of marketing for the market leader in leased pallets. “The market, as we see it, is being driven by mandates from retailers and our customers are participants.”
What changed?
“We did the math,” says Ohstrom. “When you looked at what it would take to tag 75 million pallets, develop the infrastructure and install readers at all of our repair depots, the costs outweighed the benefits.”
With the PLUS ID program:
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CHEP installs an EPC-style Gen II tag on the center block of the pallet. That’s the block that gets damaged the least.
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A permanent number that identifies the pallet is written to the tag.
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The customer can write information to the tag about the products being loaded on the pallet.
“The value to the customer is that they save the cost of tagging a pallet and they get a tag that works,” says Ohstrom. CHEP ships more than 10,000 RFID-enabled pallets every month, primarily to suppliers shipping to Wal-Mart.
Still, CHEP says they have not abandoned all plans for tagging their pallets.
Ohstrom says RFID technology is getting less costly and more reliable all the time. In addition, the company is watching developments, like a project in Japan to create an ubiquitous Web infrastructure that would reduce the cost of implementing RFID across CHEP’s supply chain.
But CHEP is in no hurry. “It took 20 years for bar codes to develop,” Ohstrem says. “With 75 million pallets in our system, it will have to get to a critical mass before it makes sense.”
Adding RFID to pallets
02/13/2005Auto-ID Center pioneers RFID use
11/30/2002Get Connected
12/31/2001Pallets: CHEP partnering with immigration
10/31/2008
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