EPCglobal Announces EPC Software Certification, RFID Deployment Tool

In total, 11 companies were granted ALE conformance certifications. Two of these, 7iD Technologies and Supply Insight also received the reader protocol certification. 7iD Technologies is a German startup with a developed reader networking platform able to link up to 200 fixed and mobile RFID readers through a central controller. Supply Insight is a Connecticut middleware provider with an emphasis on serving the Department of Defense's supplier community, which must comply with the DOD's tagging mandate.

EPCglobal began hardware certifications last year. To date, it has awarded more than 35 conformance and interoperability certificates for Gen 2 chips, interrogators and printer-encoders. As with the hardware tests, further software conformance testing will be conducted as vendors submit or resubmit their products. This will be followed by interoperability tests and certifications.

Implementation Tool
According to Mike Meranda, president of EPCglobal US, the impetus for developing the Implementation Tool Advisor grew out of watching hundreds of companies implement EPC RFID systems in the past few years and seeing different patterns emerge, based on factors such as the company's industry and size, and which department within the organization had been charged with deploying the technology. Based on this information, the group felt it could aggregate important guidance, via this tool, for small and midsize businesses just starting the process of implementing the technology.

Bob Celeste, director of adoption tools for EPCglobal US, says EPCglobal worked with early EPC RFID adopters in its community to build the tool around their experiences and key findings. "We queried our advisor base this summer to work with them and see what areas they felt they needed help with in their implementation," says Celeste.

The tool is a piece of software that anyone will be able download from EPCglobal US's Web site starting next week. To use the software, an operator establishes a profile by responding to a series of questions. Based on the responses to these questions, the tool builds out the user's particular business goals with respect to RFID and EPC, then provides a list of critical steps and implementation checklists. It also directs the user to appropriate white papers, instructional documents and other sources kept within a searchable repository called the EPCglobal KnowledgeBase, accessible through the EPCglobal US Web site.