Issue #27 | May 5, 2005

Your roving editor is writing from the Atlanta Braves vs. Florida Marlins baseball game. The game is part of the Manugistics Envision supply chain conference, where attendees are learning how RFID technology is being applied to collaborative supply chains. That's when suppliers and customers work together as a team to anticipate each other's needs. Here's the baseball connection: A collaborative supply chain should operate just like a great baseball team, where every player knows his teammate's next move.Two hot topics discussed among participants are the benefits of RFID in load verification and "date sensitive inventory" (DSI). If you're not supply chain savvy, these terms may be new to you, so let's look at what companies are up to.

When it comes to building a trailer load, order matters. Before loading items into a trailer, many companies use an application such as Manugistics NetWORKS Transport that allows them to make the best use of the space available. The dimensions of the products are entered into the system and the software determines the best layout for the items. To go one step further, a trailer may contain orders headed for several destinations. At the first stop, some of the products are unloaded. At the second stop, a few more are unloaded, and so on. For this scenario, not only are the dimensions of the product considered, but the order in which the products are put on the trailer is equally important. They need to be loaded in the reverse order that they are removed. First on is last off and vice versa. Otherwise, products have to be unnecessarily taken off to get at what needs to come off the trailer at a particular stop.

Here's where the system breaks down and companies strike out. Currently, they build loads, but can't verify the products were loaded in the correct order. It's not uncommon for the fork-lift operator to pick up items that are near each other in the warehouse and load them together to save time. The result: products get loaded in the wrong order. One company we've worked with takes an especially time consuming and expensive approach. Dedicated workers armed with clipboards walk through every trailer and manually verify that each load is built right.

Verification gets faster and easier when you combine RFID technology with a load building application. An RFID-enabled dock door allows the products to be automatically verified as they are loaded onto the truck. If a product is loaded in the wrong order, a red light flashes to alert the fork-lift driver. A nearby terminal displays what products are loaded and the next item that should be loaded. The result: fewer load errors and less time needed for verification. Best of all, the customer won't have to move someone else's products around to get to their order and the trailer won't need to be rebuilt.

Let's talk turkey. Companies use RFID to track date sensitive inventory or DSI. This is an acronym that refers to fresh products or perishable products with an expiration date. They include fruits, vegetables, meat and bread that must be sold by a certain date.

To track perishables, we have found that serialized EPC identifiers on RFID tags are better than non-serialized UPC bar codes. For one thing, it gives suppliers a better handle on their customers' inventory. Most food wholesalers cannot capture all of the data required to properly forecast when they need to restock their grocery customers. They know they have one million turkeys in their customer's inventory, but they don't know how many of those turkeys are going expire on a given date. This is because the point-of-sale information captured by the retailer is UPC bar code data, which describes only the manufacturer and the product number. But it doesn't capture the expiration date. The food company knows how many turkeys they sold, but not their expiration dates. By capturing serialized EPC data on an RFID tag, they will know specifically which turkeys have been sold and are headed for dinner plates and which ones are still at the supermarket. With this information, they can determine how many turkeys are about to expire and therefore how many they need to ship to replenish their customer's stock. It's a way to proactively determine a store's needs. The turkeys will arrive in less time and they'll be fresh longer. Call it a home run.

Written by Louis Sirico
Copyright ? 2005 Louis Sirico