Haier America Tags Freezers and Fridges

In the meantime, Haier also went to Vormittag Associates Inc. (VAI), which provides solutions to Wal-Mart and U.S. Department of Defense suppliers seeking RFID technology to comply with mandates. VAI was already supplying Haier America with a UCC 128 barcode label system. In this case, VAI designed the RFID system and integrated it into Haier America's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system housed in Haier America's headquarters in New York City. The ERP system stores and processes shipment data, including each product's stock keeping unit (SKU) and shipping status. The integration enables Haier America to automatically print RFID labels and make associations between SKUs and the unique ID numbers on the RFID tags.

"[Haier America] needed a fairly quick education," says Kevin Beasley, VAI's CIO. Haier buys many of its products from its parent company, Haier Co. Ltd. in China, which is also looking at RFID technology, although it does not have any in place yet. "We spent some time making sure what they did here [at Haier America] wasn't affected by what was happening there," Beasley says. That meant ensuring that standards in China would not create a problem for readers used in the United States. (Chinese air-interface protocol specifications and UHF frequencies differ from those in the EPCglobal UHF standards.) "That required a little bit of extra planning. Mostly that had to do with discussions with RFID printer manufacturers," he says. "We did have to make sure any equipment selected handled the frequencies currently used in China." VAI also brought in Cybra's MarkMagic middleware, which provides the printer drivers, RFID-encoding and label-design capabilities.

Although Haier America has finished its RFID implementation, the project isn't static. Every few weeks, Moser says he checks to see if Wal-Mart has added any new sites to its list of RFID-enabled distribution centers and stores, which the retailer continues to expand (see Wal-Mart Embraces RFID's Green Potential). He provides updates to the warehouse in Edison, N.J., as well as to Dura Freight. At both warehouses, if an order is placed for Wal-Mart and the goods are going to an RFID-enabled site, those items are routed to the RFID label printer. The tag in each 4- by 6-inch label is encoded with a vendor number, a SKU and a unique ID number. A worker uses a Motorola interrogator to verify that the tag is correctly encoded, then attaches the label to the appliance's box by hand. In the future, RFID data will be sent to a server in New York City to create advance shipment notices for Wal-Mart, according to Mike Morano, VAI's project director. That capability is not yet underway, Moser says.

Today, once the box ships, "we don't track the RFID data ourselves," Moser says, adding that he hasn't ruled out expanding the RFID technology in Haier America's operations to include that capability at a later time.

Currently, the company is using RFID labels only on Wal-Mart shipments. But Haier America expects it will need to expand its RFID capability to comply with other large retailers' RFID requirements.