Issue #190 | May 7, 2009 | by Andy Kowl

If you read much on RFID, by now you have read about last week's RFID Journal show in Orlando, if you were not there yourself. You might have also read about the winners of the official, annual conference awards.

Now it is time for RFID Switchboard's "Slick Operator Award." These honors are always selected with arbitrary purpose and shifting criteria. Sort of like the Academy Awards. Obviously the Slick Operator is named after Switchboard's own.

This year the quest was to see who had an innovative solution to a real problem, where the nexus of value and RFID technology was easy to convey. Put another way, it had to be cool.

I am learning from our new IT Sales Network – which I invite you to check out – that a widespread RFID industry problem is the difficulty some manufacturers have in conveying the value of their solution in an Elevator Pitch.

[For the few greenhorns in the crowd, this is when you can verbalize your product's entire value proposition, front to end, to a prospect you meet in an elevator. You only have those few floors you travel in a building before one of you gets out.]

Finding your stuff
We have been working on some articles recently about RTLS, Real Time Location Systems. I am here to tell you, the hard returns I see companies getting from RTLS is hard to ignore. That is why it is expanding as it is, in a variety of auto-ID technologies.

From some of the numbers I have seen and end-users have attested to, the savings can be so big and quick for some operations, it is hard to imagine not implementing it. Things like PINC Solutions is doing with vehicle yards and Awarepoint is doing for hospitals and many others.

But George Carlin explained the real issue. RTLS is all about finding your stuff. Everybody wants to be able to find their stuff, and people get intuitively that there is some value in that. But let me assure you, you'd need a tall building to explain why someone would want to spend five, six or seven figures to find their stuff, constantly. Saying "You can save a lot of money" doesn't count, because people are calling everyday promising the same thing.

Save huge dollars. Bonus: feed the hungry
If I manufacture, sell or buy food wholesale, tell me I can protect the 15-50% (!) of my goods that become spoiled or exceed their expiration date – and I'm interested. That is what "Freshtime tags" can do.

As we have reported, according to research by IBM, "In the U. S. alone, 300 million pounds of meat and poultry products were recalled between 1994 and 2007." I don't need a calculator to tell me the cost of that loss is way more than buying some RFID tags and handheld readers. Add to that temperature sensitive medicines, chemicals, flora and fauna; and Infratab, the system's California-based creators, have carved out a healthy target market for what they call "product integrity."

If my company does system integration for food producers, this allows me to easily tell my client, "these labels will tell you if the shipment is good or not – and they will identify how you can prevent goods from going bad next time;" and I don't have to be an RFID expert to say that. Simple. And now that Infratab has an agreement in place with market leaders Intermec, manufacturers of handheld reader/writers which can easily handle the related software.

Keeping it simple
And the cool part is you do not need an RFID reader to read the label. Green it's good; red it's bad. Can it be any easier? Some parts of the supply chain use that feature of these RFID labels. The final recipient sees a number that tells them whether to accept the shipment or not. Based on the contents of a given crate, the number designates the percentage of life left in that item.

If you are still in the elevator, you can point out these RFID tags will instantly lock down the chain of custody of my valuable and perishable products. But what should take this solution to the next level is that it does not need a completely RFID-powered supply chain for it to work. The recipients simply must know whether the number visible on the tag indicates the shipment is acceptable or not.

Whether it is poultry, tomatoes, milk or strawberries, each is profiled for proper heat and time conditions. A simple handheld RFID reader records on each tag when custody changes hand, such as if a delivery is received by a distribution center or by a trucker. The Freshtime tags record for each leg of the chain how much time elapses; whose custody the goods are in; and what the temperature is during that segment.

When the trip is complete for any case of perishable goods, the tag can be reset and re-used. Though each tag is just a few dollars, with multiple uses the cost becomes less than a dollar each time. Cool, right?

For "Slick Operator Award" Honorable Mention, see RFID Street 190.5