News from RFID Journal's Industry Summits

Millsap said his company manually tags the 400 different SKUs it ships to RFID-enabled Wal-Mart DCs. Now, however, Hampton is preparing to transition to an automated tag-application process, through collaboration with applicator provider Printonix. Switching to an automated process, he explained, should provide Hampton its first quantifiable payback, through labor savings, since it first started tagging products in late 2004. Millsap also showed attendees the homegrown data collection tool Hampton uses to perform basic analysis of the RFID read data it collects from Wal-Mart. This has provided the company insight into which Wal-Mart's RFID-enabled stores perform the best and the worst, in terms of keeping shelves stocked and following product promotion schedules.

At a session focusing on transponders, Dan Deavours, director of research at the RFID Alliance Lab and Ramesh Pisipati, project manager of Bayer Material Science, discussed how manufacturers are developing RFID technology that can survive in harsh conditions such as those found at cattle ranches and metal manufacturing facilities. In some cases, tags need to be durable enough to withstand harsh temperature changes, abrasion and "nasty chemicals," Pisipati stated.

Shabbir Dahod

Bayer Material Science is developing the materials to withstand some of that abuse, such as polyurethane covers for RFID chips in cases where normal RFID tags would not survive. The kind of material used with RFID chips can make all the difference in its effectiveness, Deavours explained. Users need to examine how well the integrated circuit is coupled or matched to the antenna, and how well the antenna and chip communicate based on their positioning in the tag.

In a session about leveraging RFID in the cold chain, Bill Hardgrave, director of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, provided preliminary results from a pilot project involving tracking the temperature of perishable goods in transit using high-frequency semi-passive RFID tags with integrated temperature sensors made by KSW Microtec.

The pilot showed that the temperature inside the refrigerated trailers used to haul the produce being tracked was not kept at a consistent level throughout the trailers. Over a haul of many hours or days, this inconsistent temperature would likely shorten the shelf life of some produce items. Being able to pinpoint which pallets carried the produce exposed to the highest temps would enable retailers to ensure that the produce with the shortest expected shelf life is sold first.

Some challenges to deploying such temperature-tracking systems successfully, he noted, would be a system for collecting and recycling the temperature-tracking tags, due to their high cost (up to $10 each), as well as the need to calibrate the tags' temperature sensors to take accurate readings in transit.

Hardgrave says the RFID Research Center expects to release the full results of the cold-chain pilot later this year.