People talk about cross reads and dense environments. What does Reva do to overcome problems like that?

BLAIR: We see, quite a few of our customers, actually in different verticals which have this issue for a challenge, reads in dense environments; things like dock doors or lanes are some of the main areas.

Also, customers with multiple manufacturing lines in close proximity to each other. And one of the things that has happened with reads, is the tags are much better; the readers are much better; much more sensitive; which actually creates more of the cross reads.

Before, the challenge used to be how to help operations read as many tags as possible. Now in some denser environments, you are seeing a lot of people saying, “Gee, I have seen that stuff in a lot of places.”

You have offered this solution for a while. How did Reva first hear about this issue as a problem?

BLAIR: We always anticipated that it would be a problem. We realized there are some properties with RFID in it being a passive technology:

Readers read. They read whatever they read.

Just by the dynamics of the RFID, sometimes there can be tags further away; sometimes they don’t see tags that are close to them. Tags in motion are typically easier to see than tags that are stationary.

Then we looked at the environments people wanted to use RFID in, the classic one being dock doors in distribution environments. They say, ‘Okay, I am going to implement all over the doors until I get to the point where the technology is able to read a hundred percent of the tags going through the doors.’ But that could be more than a hundred percent; because of the tags on adjacent doors.

When you are seeing tags in and out of dock doors, is directionality a factor as well?

BLAIR: It can be. Typically if you go back two years ago, people said, ‘I know tags come into the building and I know tags go out of the building.’ And that was kind of enough.

But, a lot of users want to know. ‘Did I receive the right goods from the right supplier? Did I ship the right goods to the right location? Did I put the right stuff on the right trucks? Did I load the right goods through the right doors?’

When you get to the point of having to say, did I put it in the right door; I now need to not only get a hundred percent read rates on those doors; but, I need to eliminate those cross reads. Eliminate those reads from adjacent doors, otherwise, I have a system that says, ‘Gee, this good probably went on this truck;’ but it could have gone on this other truck and, by the way, it might have gone on another truck.

And when you say eliminating, is it mostly a matter of sorting, or is the Reva box “intelligently understanding.” rather than truly eliminating?

BLAIR: It is intelligent understanding. It is a very educated conclusion. Reva’s approach is a very systematic approach to RFID: we make a product; it sits in the facility where the readers are and actively, dynamically controls all the readers in a facility.

For instance, in a distribution center where you have a bunch of dock doors instrumented, we are telling all the RFID readers, in all of those doors, when to read; how long to read; what powers to read.

In one cycle they read at full power, another at half power. And we understand how the readers are oriented in relation to each other. So, we know which ones face each other, which ones face away from each other, which ones are one which doors.

I believe you call this a Tag Acquisition Processor?

BLAIR: Yes, but we typically refer to it as a TAP. It controls all those readers in a facility and captures all the raw data that comes out. So the cross reads all come along.

To us, there is no such thing as bad data. It is just data. And it is how you interpret it.

So, based on knowing the configuration of the facility, knowing the orientation, knowing how many times the tags are seen, but also knowing which reader didn’t see those tags. We are able to put all of that together and come up and say, okay, intuitively although these tags were seen with Dock Doors Two, Three, Four and Five, because of the readers that actually saw them, which didn’t see them; how often they were seen; those kinds of things. We make a decision, and say, really, this group of tags went through Dock Door Two.

Would you use one TAP per facility?

BLAIR: Typically, it is one tap per facility, yes. We have two models. There is a smaller TAP for smaller facilities and a bigger TAP for bigger facilities. We have very much of a network sensibility.

We have also designed them to be automatically redundant and to support load sharing. In a really big facility, you can actually use two or more of our boxes. They will act as a synchronized system; but also if one goes down, the other one will pick up and run and operate the operations.