RFID: Catching up with Mike Dempsey

Last week, I ran into Mike Dempsey at the MHIA fall meetings in Amelia Island, Fla. I’ve been talking to Dempsey about trends in technology, especially warehouse management systems and RFID, since the late 1990’s. At Modern, were talking to Dempsey about using RFID for asset management way back in 2005, a time when most people were still focused on tagging cases and pallets in the retail supply chain. He was also the first technologist to talk to us about combining RFID with sensor technologies to not only track the location of assets, but also characteristics about the environment that might be important, like the temperature or humidity inside a refrigerated trailer or the air pressure in a truck tire. Today, Dempsey is still developing RFID solutions as director of ports, marine and intermodal solutions for Identec Solutions. 

After hanging around the industry, where is the RFID industry going today? “The big thing I’m seeing is that RFID can now be leveraged into new areas in ways we never expected it to be in the past,” says Dempsey. “And, we’re starting to see the convergence of multiple technologies that I talked about in the past to give stronger tracking and control over assets than we’ve ever had.”

Dempsey gave me a couple of examples of the kinds of solutions he’s talking about:

Asset tracking: Most of the time, we talk about asset tracking in the context of a manufacturing plant, a distribution center, a port or yard. Dempsey suggests another venue: large construction sites. One of Identec’s customers is using as many as 40,000 tags along with GPS and WiFi communications technology to keep track of tools, assets and inventory at large construction sites. Assets are tagged with an active RFID tag. The lift truck operator has a GPS system on his unit that ties the identification of the product with a putaway location when the item is stored. When the product is needed, an operator gets a map of the yard on his unit that will get him to within 30 feet of the product. At that point, an RFID reader on the lift truck can pick up the signal strength from the RFID tag, which will lead the driver right to what he’s looking for. The benefit: “You typically have a 14% loss in productivity on a construction job just looking for stuff,” says Dempsey.

Compliance and work flow management: A large chemical manufacturer in Germany is using RFID to make sure that the right chemicals and raw materials for the product being made are delivered to the right dock location at the plant. Trucks and heavy equipment used to deliver the product to the dock are tagged with an RFID tag as are the raw materials and products. Meanwhile, a reader has been installed in the ground at the drop off locations. When a truck or a piece of equipment backs into the dock location, the reader reads the tags, which causes either a green light (the right product) or a red light (the wrong product) to blink before the product is unloaded.

Productivity improvements: One major east coast port is tagging the trucks that regularly come in and out of the port. Now, when one of those trucks shows up, the RFID tag is used in conjunction with optical character recognition (OCR) technology to identify the trailer and minimize the amount of time at the gate when the truck is idling. “They’re saving about 30 minutes per truck,” says Dempsey. “It’s not only improving productivity, but there’s reduced carbon emissions because the diesel engine isn’t idling as long.”  

Those may not be the kinds of solutions we all expected to see a few years ago when we started talking about RFID in the supply chain, but they’re an exciting direction for the technology.