The following are news announcements made during the week of March 19.
Tagsys Launches Six Sigma Program
RFID systems provider Tagsys has announced it is offering its pharmaceutical customers a Six Sigma quality-of-service performance guarantee through a subscription service that includes a maintenance program and hardware upgrades. The offering promises that pharmaceutical products tagged at the item level with Tagsys’ high-frequency tags will be readable upon reaching the pharmaceutical company’s distribution center, at a Six Sigma level of accuracy. The program, says John Jordan, Tagsys’ president of worldwide operations, is designed to enable drugmakers interested in item-level tagging their products to launch such a program without concerns over tag readability and performance. The subscription service covers only high-frequency labels containing Tagsys HF inlays, converted into labels by one of Tagsys’ certified converter partners, and encoded and read using Tagsys interrogators (which can be integrated into packaging lines). Jordan explains that Tagsys will hold up its Six Sigma guarantee by promising certain levels of performance at each step in the packaging process. For example, the company will make sure no more than 5 out of every 1,000 tags are non-functional when put into the packaging system, and no more than 5 in 10,000 after the RFID-enabled labels are applied to bottles and encoded, and have moved through the packaging line. If quality levels fall below these metrics at any stage, Tagsys will work to bring the quality levels back up to the promise levels, by tuning equipment and weeding out any problem tag stock. The readers will again check that the inlays are still functioning as the bottles are being cased, and as they move through an inspection zone while leaving the packaging facility headed for the pharmaceutical’s distribution center—where, Jordan says, no more than 3.4 failures in each million tag reads is acceptable. Tagsys has not released its subscription rates for the quality-of-service program.
Mobile Aspects Adds New Features to RFID Medical Cabinet
Mobile Aspects has announced an updated version of its RFID-enabled cabinet system, designed to help health-care organizations track, store and manage medical devices and supplies. The iRISupply 4.0 system, available now, includes cabinets with adjustable shelving and reconfiguration features, enabling organizations to more easily create or change each cabinet’s layout to best suit their needs. In addition, Mobile Aspects has increased the storage capacity of the cabinet by 13 percent. The Pittsburgh-based company has also increased the system’s RFID reading capabilities by embedding more antennas into the cabinet. The antennas feature a new design allowing for three-dimensional scanning of the RFID-tagged items within the cabinet. With three-dimensional scanning, the antennas scan the tag on three different planes (above, below and from any side), allowing the tag to be read at any position on the item in the cabinet. The cabinet also features embedded lighting so organizations can more easily see into it. iRISupply 4.0 is part of Mobile Aspects’ One System of Care product portfolio, which also includes a real-time locating system (RTLS), a portable workstation for tracking drugs, a patient-tracking system and software that organizations can use to access all the data collected. Mobile Aspects’ products use Texas Instruments’ Tag-it HF-I high-frequency (HF) RFID tags, which support the ISO 15693 standard.
Impinj Signs Agreement with MD Soluciones de Identificación
MD Soluciones de Identificación and Impinj have inked a deal in which MD Soluciones will resell Impinj’s RFID readers in the Spanish and Portuguese markets. MD Soluciones is a provider of codification, identification and industrial labeling systems in Spain, Portugal and Germany, and also serves as a systems integrator in RFID projects. MD Soluciones is the lead integrator on an RFID project with Grupo Leche Pascual, a Spanish producer of packaged foods, which is testing RFID to track goods as they are produced and packed at a dairy production plant (see Leche Pascual Plans to Use RFID to Pack and Track Food Products). The agreement with Impinj, the company says, is the first in a series of international alliances on which MD Soluciones plans to embark. To date, it has invested more than €1.2 million euros ($1.6 million) on RFID and expects that to increase to 6 million over the next four years.
MasterCard and USA Tech Announce New Vending Partner
MasterCard and USA Technologies, a provider of payment terminals for vending machines, have partnered with Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company in a major push to equip 6,000 Coca-Cola vending machines and self-service food stations with USA Technologies’ e-Port G6 RFID payment terminals. This will allow them to process payments made with any RFID-enabled credit or debit card from MasterCard, American Express or Visa. Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company operates and maintains beverage and snack vending machines throughout central and northeast Oklahoma and northwest Arkansas. it will add the e-Port-reader to machines in colleges and universities, health-care and hospitality facilities, and businesses and industry workplaces in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. MasterCard and USA Technologies are working with bottling companies in more than a dozen cities nationwide to reach its goal of installing 6,000 e-Port readers into vending machines and self-service stations. Other major cities deploying the technology include Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Miami, Orlando and Washington, D.C. Last summer, MasterCard and USA Technologies worked with the Philadelphia Bottling Company to RFID-enabled 1,000 vending machines in the Philadelphia metro area with the e-Port terminal (see link https://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/2461/1/1/ Philly to Get RFID-enabled Vending Machines>).
Omnitrol, Ekahau Form Partnership
Omnitrol Networks, a Mountain View, Calif., provider of RFID and auto-ID device networking appliances, has formed a reseller agreement with Ekahau, a Finnish provider of a Wi-Fi-based real-time location tracking platform. Omnitrol has also integrated Ekahau’s Positioning Engine software, used to locate Wi-Fi RFID tags or other Wi-Fi-enabled devices, into the Omnitrol reader appliance software. The Omnitrol appliance is designed to pool inputs from multiple types of hardware, including RFID interrogators, bar-code scanners, sensors, biometric devices and programmable logic controllers (which operate conveyor systems) into one device. The appliance can also act as an access point and receive data over the Wi-Fi and Wi-Max protocols. The appliance already supports the following RFID readers: AWID‘s MPR-3014 reader (EPC Class 1 Gen 1 and 2, ISO 18000-6B UHF); Alien Technology‘s ALR9800 reader (EPC Gen 1 and Gen 2 UHF); and RFID Inc.‘s EXR1 (ISO 18000-7 RTLS standard for 433.92 MHz active tags). With the ability to track both Wi-Fi tags and Wi-Fi-enabled devices through the Ekahau Positioning Engine software, a company could use a combination of passive and active UHF tags, as well as Wi-Fi tags in a single deployment, with tag data being sent through the Omnitrol appliance to backend software.
SATO Announces New Printer-Encoder
RFID printer-encoder provider SATO America has released a new RFID printer-encoder, the GL4e, designed for medium-duty industrial applications. The device uses the AWID MPR-1510 reader module, certified by EPCglobal as conformant to the EPC Gen 2 standard. The printer is available with either a 200 dots-per-inch resolution printhead or a 300 dpi resolution printhead. The GL4e is available with either a USB 2.0 port or an 802.11g wireless card. By using SATO’s SATOnet Connect software option, end users can remotely control and monitor all SATO printers on their network. Both versions of the GL4e printer-encoder are available now. Pricing information has not been released.