RFID Journal, the world’s leading media and events company covering radio frequency identification technology, announced today the winners of the first RFID Journal Awards. The award winners will be honored at RFID Journal LIVE! 2007, RFID Journal’s fifth annual conference and exhibition, which is being held April 30 to May 2, 2007, in Orlando, Fla.
Each winner was the top choice in one of three categories:
• Hewlett-Packard Brazil: Best RFID implementation
• DHL: Best use of RFID in a service
• Dow AgroSciences: Most innovative use of RFID
The winners were each selected from among nearly 50 submissions by a panel of six independent judges, all of whom are well respected in the RFID industry.
“We congratulate each of the winners for their outstanding implementations,” says Mark Roberti, editor and founder of RFID Journal, and one of the judges. “There were many great submissions, and all of the judges found choosing only one winner in each category very difficult. It’s a testament to how far RFID has come in the past few years, that there are so many projects creating real business value today.”
Representatives from the three companies will each receive a Steuben glass trophy during a general session at RFID Journal LIVE! 2007. Each will present their implementation as a case study during the session.
Marcelo Pandini, manager of RFID and business development at Hewlett-Packard Brazil, will describe how HP uses RFID at its Sao Paolo plant to track the manufacturing and shipping of printers. More than 65 readers are installed at the site, and at least 40,000 tag reads and writes take place on printers every day, with a read-write yield of more than 99.5 percent. HP will explain how the data is being used today to drive real business value.
Keith Ulrich, head of Deutsche Post World Net‘s Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) Group, will explain how his team formulated a plan to help DHL, a Deutsche Post subsidiary, use RFID technology to track the temperature of shipments at various points from departure to arrival. The goal was to create a solution that would enable DHL and its customer to track shipment conditions in real time using RFID tags within shipping containers that could be read by interrogators at critical stages of shipment.
Andy Wurtz, Sentricon electronics technology leader at Dow Chemical subsidiary Dow AgroSciences, will explain how his team developed an RFID system allowing authorized operators of the Sentricon Termite Colony Elimination System to scan a station and determine quickly whether termite activity exists. The use of RFID allows authorized operators bypass stations without termites, instead of having to stop at each station and perform a manual inspection.
“Bringing three top-quality case studies together in one general session is unprecedented,” says Roberti. “This will truly be a unique experience—and a unique opportunity for end users to see just how much can be achieved with RFID technologies.”