March 18, 2008 – We asked Peter Blair, Reva Systems Director of Marketing, to talk about their big Metro Group win. RFID Switchboard congratulates our sponsor, who we have seen really ‘put themselves on the map’ since meeting them.

Reva’s big success recently with Metro Group got a lot of press. Tell us about that, would you?

BLAIR: Sure, Metro Group, based out of Germany, is, depending on the year, the third or fourth largest retailer in the world. And they have been actively involved with RFID for about five or six years.

We got involved with them a couple of years ago in some tests in standard organizations. In 2007, we developed a much more personal relationship. Metro is using Reva TAPs (Tag Acquisition Processors) at about 200 facilities. That includes stores, both supermarkets and department stores, as well as distribution centers.

What was it that turned the key to make the Reva controller what they decided to go with?

BLAIR: There are a couple of things. Metro has a very strong technical research group. They have a talented group of people, including physicists, who in particular are really interested in RF, who understand the technology and applications. Focused around RFID and their future. So, they tested just about everything that comes out. I mean, you name a reader vendor; they have tried them.

Well, they are really one of the pioneers in a way, in the ‘new wave’ of RFID.

BLAIR: They are. In fact, they wanted to be where they are today, a couple of years ago. They had grand plans three years ago to be at several hundred stores. They actually put the brakes on it based on the technology just wasn’t mature enough. So, they regrouped. They went with testing and research. And got with us about a year and a half ago.

The second piece is management. One of the things they understood – they have thousand of sites – and when they take on thousand of sites, they are going to be faced with a management challenge that you don’t see in a pilot. In a pilot, if something breaks down, a reader goes haywire, you send someone down to turn it on and turn it off. When you have got to do five thousand stores, that is maintenance and store managers; it just doesn’t work. With our technology, there are things we do at a facility level to optimize performance of the tag capture.

I know that one of the things TAP does is filter out extraneous reads. In order to that, does Metro have to feed a lot of data in at the front end, such as assumptions like, ‘We have certain things going here, certain things going there?’

BLAIR: That is more based on the physical configuration of facilities. Part of our package is to actually implement a scale drawing of a facility, place it on a map, a logical representation of the physical reality. So, where readers are; how they are oriented; how they are in perhaps distance and orientation to each other.

TAP then automatically configures all the readers in that facility. It will tell, okay, these readers that aren’t near each other; you have to be on the channel, broadcasting and reading at the same time. These others that are in close proximity, do not. Some are in very close proximity, but they are oriented such as that you couldn’t run those at the same time. So, the TAP automatically takes over all of that sort of ‘reader black magic,’ if you will, to optimize the system.

What, what is Metro doing next that you can talk about in their rollout?

BLAIR: There are a couple things. Their primary rollout is supermarkets. We have research to support those. It is mostly soft goods, dry goods.

Their next step is go into fresh fields. Fruits and things; meat, fruits and vegetables, which they are tracking at different points. And you can see the same infrastructure; but there is a new application that is looking for data; and that is a very different set of alerts and things, other than inventory management.