Meeting the mandate
Beaver Street Fisheries held a review session with Wal-Mart in March 2004, at which time executives from the two companies agreed that the seafood company would start by tagging all pallets and cases of its Sea Best brand jumbo breaded shrimp, catfish nuggets and snow crab clusters—three popular product lines that have different case configurations on pallets. By that time, Beaver Street Fisheries was developing its three-phase plan for implementing RFID throughout the company.

Beaver Street Fisheries’ initial goal was to meet the Wal-Mart mandate ahead of schedule, as well as to learn how different tags perform, whether the tags would function in subzero freezers, and where RFID labels should be placed on pallets and cases to get the highest read rates. The first three product lines the company planned to ship to Wal-Mart with RFID tags came from its seafood processing plant and were stored in warehouses, which contain 75,000-square-foot freezers that operate at minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit.

The company also wanted to test RFID tagging in different areas of its operation—in shipping and receiving, at the processing plant and in front of freezer doors in the warehouses. The RFID team believed it would be too costly and difficult to initially integrate tagging in four different locations of the complex—three warehouses and one processing plant. “We could have gone out and spent a lot of money duplicating it in all these different places,” Stockdale says. Instead, with the help of Bruce, the assorted vendors and Welt, Beaver Street Fisheries developed a portable tagging station.


The 6-foot-by-3-foot station is made of stainless steel and can be rolled around the grounds on casters. The station has lockable cabinets that house a computer with a touch screen and two Zebra R110 multiprotocol stand-alone RFID printer-encoders, which can encode and print bar code labels with EPC Class 1 and Class 0+ tags embedded in them. That was important because the company wanted to experiment with different tags as it tests different products. Beaver Street Fisheries is currently using Class 1 tags from UPM Rafsec on some products and Symbol Class 0+ tags on others.

Franwell’s rfid>Genesis software, running on GlobeRanger’s iMotion platform, encodes the tag information from Beaver Street Fisheries’ warehouse management system, communicates with the printers and logs the information in a database.

To validate the functioning of tags in the labels on the spot, the company purchased two Matrics DC200 portal units, each containing a Matrics AR400 RFID reader, two 3-foot-tall antennas, status lights and motion sensors. Beaver Street Fisheries saved money by mounting the reader and antennas onto wheels and moving them about the facility with the portable tagging station.

The tagging process is heavily dependent on human labor. Beaver Street Fisheries employees about 400 people and roughly 125 of them work in the warehouses. As the cases come off the assembly line from the processing plant, they are stacked on pallets and then the pallets are separated according to their destination. Pallets bound for Wal-Mart are further sorted, based on which cases will receive RFID labels. Then the pallets are stored in the freezers.

When the company needs to fill an order for Wal-Mart, warehouse workers manually take apart loaded pallets. The workers roll over the portable tagging station and the portable readers. RFID labels are applied by hand to the cases, and the pallets are put back together, issued an RFID label and then sent to Wal-Mart’s distribution center. Currently, members of the RFID team and the company’s IT staff have been operating the tagging station. After they print a label and encode the tag, they manually pass it over the shelf antenna mounted on the portable tagging station or through the reader portal and test that the RFID tag is responding to signals from the antennas. If the tag is valid, they affix the label to a case.