Overcoming technological stereotypes

For Accu-Sort, it pays to rethink old notions about automatic data collection and warehouse management systems (WMS).

By Tom Andel, Editor in chief -- Modern Materials Handling, 10/11/2007

Attendees of an Accu-Sort customer conference this week who expected to hear about huge growth in the RFID market might have been surprised by Andrew Nathanson’s assessment.

“RFID will not be as pervasive as bar codes in our lifetime,” he said. Nathanson, director of the AIDC & RFID Technology Practice for Venture Development Corporation, Natick, Mass., noted that RFID is still only a $2.4 billion market.

At its Philadelphia manufacturing facility this week, Accu-Sort demonstrated how its new AV6010 camera-based auto ID system works. As packages pass through the reading plane of each camera, the camera collects and processes the package image. The image data can be used not only to decode bar code symbologies, but exported to external systems for storage or additional processing.

“There have been a lot of performance issues with the hardware, a lot of overestimation of what the product can do and it’s been plagued by tags being commoditized before being commercialized,” he continued. “The 5-cent read/write tag everyone has been waiting for is currently selling for 23 cents a unit. That’s why RFID asset tracking is taking off faster than supply chain applications.”

He added that Wal-Mart’s vacillation on its RFID compliance mandate to suppliers has further hurt the RFID industry. He estimates that overall spending on RFID for supply chain applications--hardware alone--has only been $120 million.

“A lot of [RFID vendors] that put all their eggs in one basket are starting to feel the heat so they’re trying to find other areas of growth,” Nathanson said.

Accusort’s long-range camera system

Accu-Sort organized this meeting to show customers it wasn’t putting all its eggs in one basket, but it is consolidating several technologies into one form factor. The proof was in its introduction of its AV6010 long-range camera system. It combines camera, illumination, decoder and power supplies into one unit with a single HTML interface.

While the primary application for the AV6010 is high-volume parcel shipping, product manager Maik Fuchs says its multi-feature design might make optical character recognition (OCR) conceivable for some warehousing and distribution center applications that couldn’t have justified it before.

“You can use it to pack your parcels more efficiently and to schedule your trucks more effectively because the camera can measure the size of parcels so you can determine how many will fit on the truck,” he told Modern. “Also, when items aren’t readable [by laser scanners] they have to be rehandled. With the OCR’s better read rate you can achieve an ROI to use it with a (warehouse management system) WMS.”

Warehouse management

VDC’s Nathanson told Modern that this technology may open up new markets for Accu-Sort in non-traditional markets.

“I think there will be a change in the WMS market, because the value technologies like [camera-based auto-ID] can add above and beyond what traditional systems provide is immense,” he said. “It’s just a matter of getting that value proposition to be understood.”

Adnan Ahmed, vice president of marketing, adds that with a 75,000 hour meantime between failure, the new camera-based technology is more reliable than a laser based bar code reader system.

“It is an expensive product so you have to look at total cost of ownership,” he acknowledges.

However, further justification may come from the ability to save images for shipment documentation, as well as the possibility of monitoring facility performance and feeding that information into the IT infrastructure.