Movie, Music Suppliers Opt for Simple RFID Compliance

Once the tagged boxes are loaded on a pallet, employees use a MC9000-G handheld interrogator from Motorola (formerly Symbol Technologies) to capture all RFID numbers on the pallet and verify that the tags are working. "We don't have any kind of data synchronization," Richards says. "We have a spreadsheet we can look at for each time we ship."

According to Richards, the company could add features to the RFID system allowing it to track the movement of a box after it arrives at Wal-Mart, from the back room to the sales floor to the point of sale. Currently, however, it wants to keep the system simple and inexpensive. The RFID system, in its entirety, cost the company $20,000 to $25,000. "It's been a fairly minimal investment," Richards says.

Like Echo Bridge, Handleman Co. ships its products shelf-ready, directly from its warehouse to the store. The company had epcSolutions install and integrate RFIDTagManager with Handleman's automated distribution equipment and Oracle ERP system. Despite being one of Wal-Mart's top 100 global suppliers, the company has not yet had to ship any CDs to RFID-enabled Wal-Mart stores, because there aren't any in the geographical areas to which the company ships. Still, the firm began piloting an epcSolutions RFID system similar to EchoBridge's one year ago. Although there is not yet any demand for the system, the company says it is ready to go when the time comes.

Once a Wal-Mart store served by Handleman becomes RFID-enabled, the supplier will flag that store's identifying number in its system. As boxes travel down the conveyors at its warehouse, their bar codes will be scanned. Boxes destined for the RFID-enabled stores will be automatically diverted to an audit area, where an employee will trigger the creation of Gen 2 RFID labels on a Zebra printer-encoder by scanning the box's bar code. Before the boxes leave the warehouse, a Motorola reader will interrogate their RFID labels once more, sending the tag data to the WMS and ERP systems, thus ensuring full visibility and compliance with EDI and other customer standards.

The company says it chose epcSolutions RFIDTagManager because the software provides an appropriately sized and rapidly deployable solution with enough flexibility that it could upgrade to a more automated system if it began shipping tagged products at a high volume.

"We're focusing on the suppliers, not the Wal-Mart mandate itself," says epcSolutions' Kail. "The suppliers are the pitchers, holding the ball, and they are the ones who have to put the label on the box." For that reason, Kail says, epcSolutions has directed its efforts at providing flexible solutions that can begin with slap-and-ship and ultimately expand to integrate with a supplier's back-end system. In addition, he says, the system is designed to be easily installed and operated.

"Why spend $25,000 for software and a label printer?" notes Charles Williams, chief technology officer for epcSolutions. If suppliers need only a slap-and-ship solution, Williams says, epcSolutions can offer it for much less. Typically, he says, a supplier can become RFID compliant for $10,000.