Kimberly-Clark Gets an Early Win

RFID on the Road
But K-C still had to solve the challenge of how to tag goods—either displays or pallets and cases—at facilities without RFID tagging infrastructures; the company needed to support retail pilots outside of the Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas area, where K-C doesn't have RFID-enabled DCs. A possible solution came to Therrien and Polzin on a business trip to see one such retailer.

"We said we really need a way to take the business processes and software that we use in our DCs and put it in a briefcase and bring it on the road," says Therrien. "Rick came back and organized a meeting with our RFID technology and IT support teams to discuss the feasibility of developing an 'RFID-in-a-briefcase solution.' The team was excited by the concept and went to work trying to find the devices and software revisions that were necessary to bring it to reality. The primary requirement was that the solution must work in an environment where there is often no Internet connection, no wireless local-area network and no access even to power."

A wearable RFID tag encoder enables K-C workers or employees at a third-party packaging company to quickly encode the right EPCs for a specific batch of promotional displays.

Daniel Bowman, one of the IT hardware and network specialists in K-C's RFID lab, looked at the issue from a hardware and networking perspective. The challenge would be connecting the laptop to a small RFID printer to encode the EPC tags and to a handheld RFID interrogator that would read the applied tags and verify that the right EPCs were put on the displays. Bowman found a wireless access point made by Linksys that could be plugged into a computer's USB port to create a wireless bubble, even in a facility with no Internet access.

But there were still a number of issues that needed to be resolved. If K-C wanted to track one-off promotions, the mobile solution would not always be used at the same location. One week it might be used in Pennsylvania to tag a Kleenex brand display, and the next week it might be used in Wisconsin to tag a Huggies brand promotion. "We needed to be able to configure the software so that it would report back to us based on different locations," says Therrien, "so that the orders would flow from the correct shipping location."

Robin Krisher, software and systems specialist on K-C's RFID support team, worked with OATSystems to create and test a version of the Xpress software that could be preconfigured with information about the facility at which it would be used. The goal was to develop a simple user-interface screen. "We used the OATxpress platform to develop what we call the OAT Mobile Tag solution," says Paul Cataldo, OAT's VP of marketing and product management. "It gives the users [the contract packagers] just what they need and doesn't overwhelm them."

When K-C receives an order from a customer requiring RFID labeling, its legacy system automatically transfers the order to the Axiom software. K-C configured Xpress on a laptop, so the EPCs related to that order would automatically flow down to the laptop, where they could be sent to an encoder that would write the EPCs to the tags. Then a handheld device would be used to read the tags and verify they were put on the displays.