TrenStar: RFID With Less Risk

TrenStar's goal now is to move beyond beer. Its targeting industries where a lot of high-value assets need to be tracked across a complex supply chain. "Our goal fundamentally is to own an industry," says Dempsey. "If we can identify industries where we can be a neutral party with a majority share of the assets in the industry, that's nirvana for us."

The company already has a large presence in the South African auto industry, tracking reusable containers, and Dempsey would like to see that expand globally. Steel pallets and bombproof unit load devices (HULDs) are potential markets. And TrenStar is already moving into tracking other beverage containers in Europe, where environmental laws encourage the use of containers that can be refilled, rather than thrown away.

"We have a strong capability with RFID as an enabling technology," says Dempsey. "What we are doing now is using that RFID experience and system integration expertise to do these large-scale mobile asset management systems. Our Web-based tools give customers complete visibility and tracking capability for their mobile assets. It could be a gas tank or a fork truck. And once we start pooling a specific industry, we can reduce the average variable cost for the use of containers across the entire industry."

The business model will likely appeal to companies in industries where margins are thin and tracking assets is a headache, not a core business skill. One question is how flexible the company's core Internet technology is for tracking within different industries. Wayne Aronson, Trenstar's CIO, says the basic system of tracking goods works for almost any company in any industry, and the Web interface and reports were built so that they could be customized by the customer. Among the reports you can create are "Drayman's Performance" in the beer industry and "Consumption Summary" for the food sector.

"We can work with bar codes, RFID tags and a client's own unique numbers by linking them to our numbering system," Aronson says. "We can track the container and the contents inside. We link contents to the container. If only a few items are removed at a particular station, they can be scanned out and we can continue to track the container."

The system scans and reports at three levels: site, receiving, and dispatch. You can drill down on the Web and see where any container is at any time, and you can manage by exception by having the system send reports when a container didn't arrive when and where it was supposed show up. TrenStar has the capability to integrate the data with existing enterprise resource planning software, particularly SAP.

"When we first developed the system for ourselves seven years ago, we made a lot mistakes," says Aronson. "But we persevered, and it was only through working in a lot of companies where we reduced their inventory holdings and introduced efficiencies with our or own containers and management system that we started getting requests to manage third party containers. That's how the business was really born."