Congratulations to the RFID Journal Award Winners

By Mark Robert

April 9, 2007—If you are a sports fan, you feel a deep appreciation for excellence on the field, pitch, rink or wherever. You get a sense of joy from watching someone else do something special—like pitch a shutout in baseball or make a fantastic save at the World Cup. I get a similar sense of joy from reading and writing about excellence in business, which is why it's been especially rewarding to create the RFID Journal Awards and select three deserving winners.

This week, we announced that the panel of judges has chosen Hewlett-Packard Brazil for the best RFID implementation, DHL for the best use of RFID in a service and Dow AgroSciences for the most innovative use of RFID (see RFID Journal Announces Winners of First RFID Journal Awards). The awards will be presented at RFID Journal LIVE! 2007, and a representative from each company will discuss its particular project.


Marcelo Pandini, RFID and business development manager at HP Brazil, will explain how the company is using RFID to track large amounts of serialized product. The tags incorporate data needed for warranty and service information. At its Sao Paolo site, which manufactures printers, more than 40,000 reads and writes take place on work-in-process every day. Some 65 interrogators have been installed to track parts as they are added to the printer chassis, with a read-write yield of better than 99.5 percent.

Keith Ulrich, director of Deutsche Post's Technology and Innovation Management Group, will explain how his team developed an RFID temperature-tracking application for DHL, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post, so DHL could monitor the condition of drugs and other products being shipped. Using RFID temperature tags from Infratab, DHL now gives its pharmaceutical customers the ability to proactively respond to shipment problems in transit, which has improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. It's also given DHL a competitive edge and a significant new source of revenue growth.

Andy Wurtz, technology leader at Dow AgroSciences's Sentricon unit, will discuss a truly innovative application that involves using an RFID tag attached to a sensing device that indicates whether termites are active in a Sentricon monitoring station. Previously, trained technicians had to inspect the stations by opening them manually, scanning a bar code on the station cap for recordkeeping and recording the condition of the monitoring device. The result: Sentricon increased the efficiency of an authorized operator by 67 percent.