Apr 20, 2018Electronics and passive RFID technology company Feig Electronics has acquired mobile scanner producer Panmobil Systems in an effort to provide a wider spectrum of RFID technology and bar-code options to its customers. With the acquisition, Feig is now poised to sell not only its existing fixed reader technology, but also handheld or wearable RFID readers with built-in bar-code scanners, thereby enabling a greater variety of solutions to more companies. The acquisition is expected to widen Feig's audience of prospective RFID solutions users.
Feig is now selling Panmobil's handheld products along with its own, the companies report, while the Panmobil brand name will remain for now. The electronics company, headquartered near Frankfurt, manufactures its own RFID hardware onsite. In the meantime, Panmobil's products will continue to be developed and manufactured, by Feig, at Panmobil's Cologne site, located approximately 70 miles away. Feig will be able to provide solutions to each of Panmobil's and Feig's customer bases—which, until now, have been largely unrelated, says Markus Desch, the technical director of Feig's Identification and Payment Divisions.
Panmobil has been in operation for about 30 years. The company offers bar-code scanning equipment, says Andreas Binder, the manager of the company's system and project department, that was also RFID-enabled. Feig, on the other hand, makes a variety of electronic products, including identification systems employing RFID. Its UHF and HF RFID hardware consists of a variety of fixed reader systems, including portal and desktop readers.
As RFID use becomes more commonplace, however, end users have been trying to broaden how they leverage RFID tags on their premises. Over the years, Desch seuas, "We learned from our customers that they were interested in both stationary and mobile products." He says his firm recently began seeking a company to acquire that already offers such handheld or other mobile devices. Such an acquisition, Desch explains, would enable Feig to offer handheld-based solutions, along with the other RFID reading devices, much sooner than if the company simply began developing new technology of its own.
With the acquisition, Desch says, Feig can not only offer a wider range of products, but also sell its fixed readers to existing Panmobil customers. For Panmobil, Binder adds, the benefit is in selling its products to a much larger audience to which Feig already has access.
Feig will continue to work with several distribution partners, including RFID Canada, a provider of UHF, HF and NFC technologies. As a long-standing distributor of Feig Electronics' products, says Bob Moroz, RFID Canada's president, "We feel that this will allow RFID Canada to provide the Canadian market with a complete compatible product line under one leading brand." The Panmobil portable products, he adds, "complement very well Feig's current line of fixed readers."
While Feig is immediately selling around three new Panmobil products, Binder say, others are currently in development. For instance, Feig is working on a wearable glove device with a built-in UHF RFID reader, as well as a bar-code scanner. The product, known as Werker 4.0, is intended for use in identifying tagged items within warehouse environments.
For example, a warehouse employee wearing the glove could read the RFID tag of each item he or she picked to fulfill a shipping order, or use the same product to simplify the scanning of bar codes. The glove, Binder says, promises to save approximately 10 to 15 percent of the labor time picking workers would otherwise spend, as they would need to use a handheld device to identify items as they picked them from shelves in a warehouse.
The glove is still in development, the company reports.
In addition, Feig has recently released a new RFID gate antenna intended for use in tracking the movements of people or items through bottlenecks or portals. The antenna is designed to reduce or eliminate the risk of false alarms that can be caused by some traditional UHF RFID readers that might capture stray reads from items that are near a portal but not passing through it.
With the new antenna, users can set up zones within read range, based on signal strength. The system could then ignore any tags interrogated within the zone that have the weakest signal. The new antennas have been available since January 2018, the company reports, and are in use by customers that have large volumes of individuals or items passing through portals, creating a complex reading environment in which stray reads might be commonplace.
