Getting started
The more Stockdale learned about RFID at the Wal-Mart supplier meeting, the more he realized that RFID technology could be used by Beaver Street Fisheries to reengineer the company’s business processes. As with many small and midsize firms, Beaver Street Fisheries has a homegrown warehouse management system crafted by the company’s IT department to track inventory. Stockdale and his crew also developed their own enterprise resource planning software to get a sky-level view of what’s going on at the business. The company relies on bar codes to identify its product lines, which requires workers with handheld readers in the warehouses to physically scan shipments as they are sent or received.

Stockdale followed Wal-Mart’s guidelines for how to get started. In February 2004, he assembled a cross-functional team at Beaver Street Fisheries, which included O’Brien; Steve Wade, head of shipping; Larry Howe, warehouse manager; Roger Denmark, case-ready production manager; Sloan Erdman, production manager; Brigette Cruz, special projects manager; and Sam Kalil, director of Wal-Mart sales. Stockdale chaired the RFID committee.

On Feb. 10, the group met with Rich Bruce, an RFID specialist with The Danby Group, a supply chain integrator. He brought along Matt Ream, RFID market development manager, and Jim Sojka, regional sales manager, both of Zebra Technologies, which makes bar code label printers that can also write data to RFID tags embedded in smart labels, and a representative from Matrics, at the time one of only two companies that designed and manufactured EPC-compliant RFID tags and readers. (That representative no longer works at Matrics, which is now owned by Symbol Technologies.) They discussed the different types of tags, antennas, readers and printers that could be used to meet Wal-Mart’s mandate.


Bruce also gave a presentation about the myriad other ways RFID could be used at Beaver Street Fisheries—including receiving and tracking frozen seafood at the warehouse, tracking the temperature it was frozen at in transit, and locating employees with RFID badges in the event of an emergency, such as a hurricane or fire. “They have 110 containers in transit at all times,” Bruce says. “They could use RFID to locate material in the warehouse, do inventory, pull products, collect data through the portals, track trucking in the yard.” After the meeting, Bruce says, “They started burning up the Internet looking for information.”

The RFID group at Beaver Street Fisheries met weekly. Bruce returned a few weeks later with Jeff Wells, president of Franwell, a Florida company that specializes in implementing RFID systems, to talk about Franwell’s rfid>Genesis software, which uses data from a company’s existing warehouse management system to encode RFID tags and send commands to an RFID tag printer-encoder. Wells also introduced the company to GlobeRanger’s iMotion Edgewhere platform, a middleware layer for managing devices, networks, data and processes around the enterprise, enabling real-time responses. Franwell’s software is built to run on the GlobeRanger platform. In addition, Bruce Welt, Ph.D., assistant professor at the agricultural and biological engineering department’s packaging science program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, was brought in as an advisor because of his research on using RFID to track food products.

During the course of several weeks, the RFID group at Beaver Street Fisheries also brainstormed with company officials, including representatives from accounts receivable and inventory control, on how to automate various processes.

“They have never looked at this as an added cost of doing business with Wal-Mart,” says Bruce. “This was a way for them to leapfrog ahead of their competition. They have always been positive about this, not like everyone else who is looking at this as a pain or a hassle. They believe being compliant with Wal-Mart will help them target other business.”