PART TWO of a talk with Bob Scher, CEO of Dynasys in Clearwater, Fla., about the university laboratory market. Bob relates where the labs find unexpected billing benefits and the industrial parallels. Dynasys is the leading distributor of Texas Instruments RFID products.

Now what did they do prior to RFID that was not as helpful?

SCHER:  Well, in the most primitive fashion, they just take three by five index cards and a pencil, and scribble whatever data they want on the paper cards. They go around with a pad and a pencil and taking inventory. 

That is the most primitive fashion and is still being used today.  And the more advanced, where they had a barcode printed on the three by five index card, they call that a cage card. And on that cage card it would have the protocol number. 

The most important thing on the card is that number, because that number relates back to everything about that animal. The day it was born; the species; the investigator who is responsible for that animal; the contact information of that investigator in case of an emergency. The cage card has all that data on it.

Now, where are the biggest savings that they are finding in going from the old to the new techniques?

SCHER:  There are two types of cost savings that are immediately seen going from barcode to RFID. One is the actual labor cost savings involved, in having to take inventory or cycle counts of every cage in the room. That is the immediate and obvious cost benefit. 

Far more important than that, far more important, is the fact that you are eliminating errors.

Give me one example.

SCHER:  One example: let me give you an analogy. You check into a hotel, you are a business traveler; and you are in that hotel from Wednesday through Friday.  And you are checking out; your business is over; so you go down to the front desk and you check out and they hand you a bill. 

But, you kind of left the key on the counter. After they gave you the bill, you grab your key when nobody is looking and go back up to the room and figure, “I am going to spend the weekend here, they probably won’t even know I am here,” and you get a free weekend package. 

That is exactly what goes on in these facilities. The funding agency is paying for the animal care services that the universities provide. It is like a hotel.

The university takes care of an animal during the research and is billing accordingly. If that animal is officially checked out of the database, the billing cycle stops. But, that animal may still remain within the facility and the university is losing money.

So, it is the university then that can actually get paid more properly for what they have done.

SCHER:  Absolutely. First of all, there are no errors. They can account for every rodent in the facilities. And these rodents, again, could be infected with diseases or have radial isotopes exposure. They can’t just be disappearing. People can’t be taking these home as pets because they look cute.

These are very serious experiments going on. So, it is important that they have 100 percent reconciliation for where every animal lives and for every moment.

Secondly, there is a billing cycle going on. Any animals they are housing, that they are not billing for – they are losing money every day. With our system, they get 100 percent reconciliation immediately and can direct the billing cycle accordingly.

That is great.  And the response from the hospitals, I assume, has been positive.

SCHER: Absolutely. The bottom line is we have a number of customers looking at our system now and are getting very close to implementing.

And you have implementations going?

SCHER:  The major implementation that is going for over a year, is at the University of Florida, that was our test site. That got put in over a year ago and we have seen that daily in full operation.

Is there any, can you characterize any skepticism that the buyers have when they first hear about this?

SCHER:  Well, one of the concerns – and it is a very legitimate concern – the question would be how will the animals’ behavior possibly be affected by the use of RFID within their facility. 

We had to cover that question by having an animal physiologist do behavior experiments on the animals to show that there was no appreciable effect on the animals at all. It was a very positive result.

So, Bob, do you see other applications for this?

SCHER:  Yes, I mean, this system, the heart of the system, is a standard warehouse management system. You check your receiving goods in; in this case you are receiving animals in. They are inducted into the system. They are put away in inventory, just like you would in a warehouse. There are periodic cycle counts here, just like in a warehouse.

We call it census taking, but in the warehouse it is just like checking what asset inventory you have. And then, and then when you do a pick a warehouse, we call that a check out. We check cages out of the system.

In the warehouse analogy you are doing the picking, and the stuff gets shipped. So, really what we have is a very sophisticated RFID warehouse management system.