Kimberly-Clark Gets an Early Win

The data from the handheld device had to flow back to the laptop and be uploaded to Axiom, so K-C could generate an advance shipping notice (ASN) to send to its retail partner, which would let the retailer know which displays were coming and what the EPCs on them would be. Since displays are sometimes assembled and packed by contract packagers with no Internet connectivity, the "Portable Edge" solution, as it became known within K-C, had to be able to capture information within the facility and then transfer it back to Axiom the next time the laptop was connected to the Internet.

Another issue was finding an RFID printer small enough to ship around the country. O'Shea's RFID team began looking for hardware that could be shipped to a remote location to encode, apply and verify tags. There were a number of handheld RFID interrogators that could be used to read the tags after they were applied; the challenge was finding a small device that could encode RFID tags.

The encoded EPC tags are applied to displays so K-C can track them from the moment they are shipped until they reach the store floor.

Gary Madsen, a member of O'Shea's RFID team, found a possible solution—the PAD3500, a wearable RFID encoder made by a startup called ADASA. Madsen arranged a demonstration of the encoder, and afterward ADASA sent a test model to K-C for development. The PAD3500, which can be worn on a belt, is comprised of a cartridge that holds a roll of up to 500 1-by-4-inch RFID inlays and a battery-powered RFID interrogator made by RFID systems developer SkyeTek. It was originally designed to work with reusable tags.

"Shortly thereafter, I met [ADASA founder Clark McAllister] at RFID Journal LIVE! in Las Vegas last May," says Therrien. "He told me about how he thought it could be used. I said: 'We have a different spin for you, something you probably haven't thought about yet.' We brought him to our RFID lab and showed him our RFID-in-a-briefcase concept."

K-C's Bowman worked with OAT to make sure the Xpress software could run on a laptop securely and communicate with the PAD3500 so it could encode tags remotely. He developed a simple interface that would let the user in the remote facility switch from operations mode, where data is sent to and from the ADASA encoder and to and from a handheld interrogator made by Symbol Technologies (now Motorola's Enterprise Mobility Business), to data-synchronization mode, during which the verified tag reads are automatically sent back to K-C's Axiom software.

OAT developed interfaces to the Symbol and ADASA mobile devices, so Xpress could send data to and receive data from the devices. It also developed a version of Xpress that uses Microsoft's SQL Server Express, a database with a smaller footprint, which would make the software run more efficiently on the laptop.