Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas will use RFID to help volunteers track and sell products in a gift shop within the Mercy Medical Center in Rogers, Ark. The shop is currently under construction and due to open in March.
While a gift shop is not the first area of a medical center where one might expect to find an RFID system deployed, Ken Trussell, president and CEO of RFID systems integrator Bentonville International Group (BIG), says it could serve as a springboard for employing RFID in other applications at the facility, from asset tracking to drug distribution. The hospital expects the use of RFID within the store to yield a number of benefits, including improved inventory accuracy, theft reduction and improved sales promotion.
BIG will work with the hospital’s IT team to implement the gift shop’s RFID system by mid-February, in advance of the store’s opening. As the store receives goods for sale, staff members will place an Alien Technology EPC Gen 2 UHF Squiggle tag on nearly each item sold in the shop (the exceptions, Trussell says, being low-cost, high-volume goods such as candy, which won’t be tagged).
Each tag will come pre-encoded with a unique identifier. The staff will read the tag’s ID, using a handheld Motorola EPC Gen 2 RFID interrogator, then select the item’s name from a drop-down menu in RFID middleware developed by students from the nearby University of Arkansas. (The products are first divided into categories, each of which has drop-down menus to make it easy for the volunteers to locate a particular item.)
When tagged goods are brought to the cash register for purchase, an RFID antenna built into the sales counter will collect the unique IDs from the items’ tags. The RFID middleware will send the item names to the point-of-sale (POS) software, which will total the transaction, based on current prices, and the clerk will then process payment. The POS system will generate a transaction ID, which it will transmit to an RFID database, along with the price paid for each item purchased.
The RFID database will then mark each item as sold in the main database, removing it from inventory. Trussell says an RFID interrogator will be mounted around the store’s doorway, linked to an alarm that will alert staffers whenever a tagged item is removed from the shop without being sold.
If a customer later returns an item with its tag still intact, the staff will be able to use that tag to call up the item transaction number, which they can utilize to locate the transaction in the POS database in order to process the return. (Customers looking to return non-tagged goods, or items whose tags have been removed, must present a sales receipt.)
During the RFID system’s development, Trussell worked with Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas CEO Susan Barrett to sketch out the preliminary goals of the gift shop application. Trussell also turned to Craig Thompson, a computer science professor at the University of Arkansas. The university has an RFID research laboratory that has contributed considerable research in the field of supply chain RFID, and its computer science school has integrated RFID technology into its curriculum.
Thompson asked three students from his RFID middleware course to develop a software platform for the gift shop’s RFID system that would meet criteria set forth by the medical center’s IT department, while also serving as an academic project. Wesley Deneke and Evan Kirkconnell (both graduate students) and Jarrod Bourlon (an undergrad) took up the challenge, eager to get some real-world implementation experience under their belts.
“We had started the project working with RFID middleware developed [at the University of Arkansas] by a Ph.D. student,” Deneke says, “but then decided to craft our own application.” That way, they could customize the application to work side-by-side with the shop’s POS computer system.
The trio proceeded to write the program, using the Java programming language and Microsoft‘s Access database software. The need to maintain the RFID tag database separate from the point-of-sale software presented some challenges, Kirkconnell says. Trussell says the request for separate systems was due, in part, to concerns that the amount of data the RFID system would generate could overwhelm the POS software.
According to Trussell, BIG is also working with the hospital to test an application that would generate personalized messages for shoppers who agree to wear an RFID-enabled badge into the store. He says the participants have not yet been selected, but will most likely be hospital staff members who frequent the gift shop. An RFID interrogator linked to a video monitor within the store would read the Gen 2 tag embedded inside the badge, causing product messages to appear based on the types of items the participant likes to purchase (as indicated in a profile submitted previously by that individual). A tag worn by someone interested in aromatherapy products, for instance, might prompt a message about a sale on scented candles.