Mandating the Right Infrastructure
By D'Anne Hotchkiss, Editor -- RFID News & Solutions, 8/17/2005
There’s no real ROI in slap-and-ship compliance. But “the mandate phase gives you good solid data to create the basis for the ROI,” says ODIN technologies president and CEO Patrick Sweeney. Done correctly, the pilot provides information to help the manufacturer decide when to move RFID tagging from shipping to the production line.
It all comes down to RFID infrastructure. “The critical part is first getting the infrastructure right. It’s more than a middleware or integration issue. If you don’t get the infrastructure right from the beginning, then the data isn’t right,” Sweeney says. Telephone service is his analogy. “You can have the fanciest phone in the world, but if the dial tone works only half the time, it doesn’t matter how many people you can conference-call in.”
For the past two months Thomasville Furniture has shipped RFID-tagged, ready-to-assemble furniture from its Appomattox, Va., distribution center to Target’s Tyler, Tex., distribution center. The shipments are confirmed automatically by Target.
With the “successful data back from the retailer, and internally, we know the data rates for the time to build a pallet and print the tags. With this information and the baseline metrics applied to the business, we can learn the tipping point: when it makes sense to integrate RFID in the manufacturing process,” Sweeney says.
His company provided system integration services to Thomasville, including RFID network design and deployment of Alien Technology readers and Zebra Technologies printer-encoders. Products are tagged as they are picked using Accu-Sort mobile tagging stations. Shipcom Wireless RFID middleware connects the RFID application to the existing software used to direct picking operations. Help desk and on-site technical support are provided by Unisys.
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