Packaging Maker Offering Tamper-Evident RFID Film

Doug Lilac, Pliant's technical director for innovation, says the company worked with a number of technology providers to develop the new product platform, currently being demonstrated at two of its research and development centers in Newport News, Va., and Chippewa Falls, Wisc. Pliant has not yet settled on a name for the platform, and says it is continuing to optimize the system, which is being pilot-tested at the R&D centers. However, Bill Barlow, a product development engineer with Pliant, says the company is ready to begin working with its customers that want to begin testing the product in their own facilities. Pliant declined to reveal any pricing information for the platform at this stage.

Lilac says Pliant can modify any EPC Gen 2 standard inlay to work with the circuit board. Both it and the secondary tag can be used to satisfy RFID mandate requirements from Wal-Mart, Target and other retailers. According to Lilac, Pliant has been working with the DOD since the earliest stages of its RFID product development, and the government department is currently working with Pliant to test the system for such DOD applications as transporting pallets of high-value or hazardous materials between DOD depots, as well as relying on the system to indicate possible tampering with the pallet.

Pliant, Lilac notes, believes its customers in the pharmaceutical industry would also be interested in using the RFID-enabled film to bolster its product security measures—while also using it to track pallets. Pliant chose to create a tamper-evident stretch film based on RFID technology not only because of the cross-functionality it offers with product tracking, but also because it can cut labor costs. Because it can indicate a tampering event without requiring a physical inspection via a line-of-sight laser scanner, such as those required by some specialized inks, RFID adds a level of time and labor efficiencies. "If you have pallets stacked three high and three deep, you can't see the ones in back," says Bill Barlow, product development engineer for Pliant, "so something like an ink-based technology [for indicating tampering] would not be as easy to check as RFID."

IBM assisted Pliant in deploying proof-of-concept demonstrations of the system at its Virginia and Wisconsin R&D centers. Pallets are built and wrapped in the RFID-enabled film at each center, then sent to the opposite center, where Pliant staff members use handheld interrogators running IBM's WebSphere RFID middleware to read the tags attached to the pallets. IBM consultants worked with Pliant to create Web pages on a network database, allowing them to collect the tag data and read events and locations from the WebSphere middleware.

Pliant customers looking to use the RFID-enabled stretch film could choose either WebSphere or other RFID middleware platforms to manage the tag data, says Lilac. The middleware would need to associate the pallet, however, with the EPCs of both the tag linked to the conductive trace and the one embedded in the secondary label.