The case will proceed down the conveyor belt and pass a Symbol shelf antenna mounted on the side of the conveyor, to make sure the read rates comply with Wal-Mart’s and other retailer’s requirements. The case will then be put on a pallet. When the pallet is shrink-wrapped, a pallet tag will be generated from a Zebra R110 stand-alone printer-encoder and applied manually. As the pallet is moved out of the production-processing area, it will pass through a portable Matrics DC200 portal, and the pallet and case tags will be read again.

Stockdale says Beaver Street Fisheries expects to realize benefits in the third phase of its RFID deployment, which should begin within the next two years. That’s when the company will deploy readers at loading-dock doors and start using the data captured from RFID-tagged pallets and cases destined for Wal-Mart and other companies. Beaver Street Fisheries’ RFID team believes there are all sorts of manual internal business processes that could be automated.

The company’s long-term vision involves convincing its seafood suppliers around the world to apply RFID tags at the source with data such as country of origin, method of catch, weight, date and temperature at which the seafood was frozen. Beaver Street Fisheries is required by the government to keep this information, and it could help the company ensure that its products have a long shelf life for its own customers. Seafood tagged at the source could be automatically received into Beaver Street’s inventory, and payments could be automatically initiated, instead of requiring workers to key in information and authorize payment to seafood suppliers.

Casting a wide net
Beaver Street Fisheries’ experience is different from that of many of Wal-Mart’s top 100 suppliers, because the company is smaller, less complex and—admittedly—further behind in its supply chain technology and business process infrastructure. While the company uses bar codes on shipments and keeps pertinent information for government regulators, it doesn’t use the information to analyze sales and look for how it could cut costs and boost sales.

“The less sophisticated you are, the easier it is to make gains,” says The Danby Group’s Bruce. “If you’ve already optimized your facility and processes, then doing this is a real pain.”

So far, Beaver Street Fisheries has spent roughly $100,000 on its RFID implementation for phases one and two. The company says it has been able to keep costs low by using the portable tagging station and by beta-testing products, including the Zebra R110 printer-encoder, the Franwell software and a variety of RFID tags from Alien, Symbol and UPM Rafsec. “When companies are bringing new products to market, they want to put them in a real-world environment,” Stockdale says. “The real test is actually out in the real world.”

But it’s still a hefty investment for a small company. Most of the tags it tested cost between 70 cents and $1-plus each. A full conversion to RFID using its present 70-cent tags would cost Beaver Street $189,000 a month for case tags alone. The additional cost for pallet tags would add several thousand dollars to that monthly tab. Stockdale says that the company has been assured by its vendors that it can upgrade to EPCglobal’s Generation 2 standard, which was ratified in December, and hopes the new standard will bring better-performing and less expensive tags. He says that Beaver Street Fisheries has started to convert its own RFID labels, working with its longtime Jacksonville-based business partner Donnick Label Systems.

Beaver Street Fisheries is using its status as an RFID-capable seafood supplier to seek other business. The company has volunteered to ship RFID-tagged products in two other pilot programs—one involves a retail chain, the other does not (the company declined to specify these organizations). “If you want to be in the game,” Stockdale says, “you have to bring a bat and a ball.”