Tyco Electronics Uses Wi-Fi for Trailer Tracking

Paul Cataldo, OATSystems' VP of marketing, likens the system to an airport, with the server acting as an airport reader board displaying each trailer's status, as well as which building it has arrived at or departed, and when. "One of the keys to this deployment was leveraging the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure that can correlate a tag to an access point," Anderson says. "For this application, we only need to know which building a trailer is located at."

This, Anderson explains, eliminates the need to implement a conventional real-time locating system that uses multiple access points to more precisely triangulate an asset's location. "Since we didn't have to install new access points [or RFID readers]," he adds, "this was a very inexpensive solution and easy to deploy."

Prasad Putta

Tyco Electronics estimates that an annual cost savings of more than $100,000 from improved efficiencies will be realized once the system has been fully integrated into the operation's business processes. "The return on investment is very tangible and real," Anderson says.

One potential future enhancement of the RFID tracking deployment is to deploy a passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID system with portals installed at dock doors at the distribution center, and EPC Gen 2 tags attached to cartons and pallets containing products and components. In that way, says Prasad Putta, OATSystems' founder, Tyco Electronics can track not only the trailer but the goods within it as they are unloaded and reloaded in different trucks.

Plans for expanding the current implementation and incorporating new features are currently in progress, Anderson says. "What they need initially is presence-based active RFID," Putta notes. "They want to know, 'Is it here, or not?'"