- Tageos Joins Auburn University RFID Lab Advisory Board
- CenTrak Launches IoT Consulting and Training Service
- IIoT and Digital Twin Consortiums Publish Security Guide
- ParkourSC Acquires IoT Company Qopper
- RTLS Company Inpixon/IntraNav Joins SAP Partner Program
- Avnet, Amazon Forge IoT Strategic Collaboration
- GS1 Australia Unveils New RFID Coalition
Presented here are recent news announcements in the radio frequency identification and Internet of Things industries.
Tageos Joins Auburn University RFID Lab Advisory Board
Tageos, a provider of RFID inlays and tags, will join the Auburn University RFID Lab‘s advisory board on July 1, 2022. The research institute focuses on the business case and technical implementation of RFID and other emerging technologies in the retail, aviation, supply chain and manufacturing sectors. The advisory board, which has 19 members and meets three times annually, is presented with the lab’s research progress and latest outcomes, and its meetings are intended to facilitate the discussion of cross-industry best practices.
“Tageos has been a strong partner with our lab and will now provide even more industry insight and strategic direction for our research efforts,” said Justin Patton, the RFID Lab’s director, in a prepared statement. “The company’s longstanding commitment to the advancement of RFID technology will be a valuable asset to our lab.”
Tageos is headquartered in Montpellier, France, with offices, sales, research and development and operations in Germany, the United States, Hong Kong and China. A long-time supporter of Auburn’s ARC program, the inlay manufacturer has obtained ARC Quality Certification for its RFID inlays and tags. The program is designed to ensure that tags can meet or exceed the levels of performance and quality necessary to provide benefits to end users in a consistent and cost-effective manner.
“We feel very honored to have been offered the opportunity to join the advisory board of Auburn’s RFID Lab,” added Matthieu Picon, Tageos’s CEO, in the prepared statement. “Within the RFID industry, Auburn’s RFID Lab is a research institute with the highest profile and reputation. As a leading supplier of RFID inlays and tags, Tageos stands for innovation, quality and sustainability—confirmed by today’s largest portfolio of paper-based products approved by ARC. With our membership on the advisory board, we will continue to support its values for the benefit of all users of RFID technology. We look forward to a sound collaboration with all members of the board.”
CenTrak Launches IoT Consulting and Training Service
CenTrak has announced the launch of its EngageSM consulting and training services, designed to provide a tailored, multi-tiered assessment and transformation program to healthcare systems. Through practical guidance, the company explains, healthcare facilities can maximize real-time technologies and drive meaningful change. Following a review of current processes, Engage provides practical recommendations on how to enhance asset management, staff workflow optimization and patient throughput, while increasing productivity and reducing operating costs through the application of real-time location systems (RTLS).
“As CenTrak continues to grow beyond its origins as a technology vendor and further establish itself as an end-to-end strategic solutions provider, our team is excited to support healthcare organizations in their efforts to enhance the patient experience, improve staff satisfaction, and gain operational efficiencies at such a crucial time,” said Scott Hondros, CenTrak’s VP of professional services, in a prepared statement. “We’ve found the best way to achieve this is through a personalized approach that combines expert consulting and workflow redesign customized to the unique needs and goals of each facility. With this methodology, our team helps healthcare leaders fully leverage location services while driving user adoption and change management.”
Engage uses a proprietary, three-phased framework for change management. After assessing a facility’s needs, CenTrak’s team ensures the right technology is deployed, the correct processes are in place to leverage the investment, and adequate resources are available to those running the program. CenTrak’s clinical consultants, hospital operations experts and business analysts provide use-case assessments and develop a strategic roadmap, deployment plan, operational model and budget summary.
CenTrak reviews standard operating procedures, assists with redesigning facility processes, creates communication plans and training tools, and monitors post-go live activities to identify process gaps and any need for additional training. Its consultants assist with deriving actionable intelligence from location system, which includes implementing process changes, sending notifications about anomalies for proactive action, and identifying and monitoring ongoing metrics for success. The process documents ROI and value measurements and develops management reports.
IIoT and Digital Twin Consortiums Publish Security Guide
The Industry IoT Consortium (IIC) and the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) have announced the “IoT Security Maturity Model (SMM) Digital Twin Profile.” This profile extends guidance from the previously published “IoT Security Maturity Model (SMM): Practitioner’s Guide” for digital twin systems. According to the two organizations, the profile enables those who design and deploy digital twins to understand how to evaluate and achieve appropriate security maturity for their systems.
Digital twins, a virtual representation of real-world processes and entities synchronized in frequency and fidelity, are intended to raise unique security maturity concerns beyond general considerations. “Digital twins are not simply software, as they can be connected and synchronized with real critical assets,” said Ron Zahavi, an IoT SMM coauthor and the DTC’s executive director, in a prepared statement. “This work is the result of collaboration between the IIC and DTC and explores what is unique to digital twins in the context of IoT security maturity.”
The profile emphasizes the need to understand the nature of digital twins, the organizations explain, including one or multiple digital twins and how they relate to assets and organizational boundaries, as well as the scope and function of the frequency and fidelity of synchronization. “Digital twin technology is becoming central to digital transformation, so it is important to understand how to achieve security maturity when using it,” added Frederick Hirsch, an IoT SMM coauthor and a cochair of the IIC Trustworthiness Task Group, in the prepared statement. “This profile will enable a better and faster understanding of the issues related to security maturity for digital twin systems.”
The profile highlights that maturity for SMM security practices can range from considering twins and assets separately to proactive considerations of complete systems. The document guides the eighteen SMM practices, ranging from security program management to data protection, remediation and recovery related to this need range. “Security and trustworthiness in connected systems depend just as much on people and process as they do technology,” said Jon Geater, an IoT SMM coauthor and the chief product officer at RKVST, in the statement. “The release of this detailed maturity model for vendors and users of digital twins is a huge step forward in enabling understanding and evaluation of trustworthiness of these systems in the real world.”
Organizations can combine the Digital Twin Profile with SMM mappings, such as the industrial manufacturing 62443 mappings, to relate concrete security controls requirements with maturity comprehensiveness levels for practices. They can combine it with other SMM vertical industry profiles to provide digital twin guidance for various industries. In conjunction with the general guidance in the SMM practitioner’s guide, these guides can help practitioners achieve an appropriate level of security maturity for digital twin systems, according to the consortia.
ParkourSC Acquires IoT Company Qopper
ParkourSC, a provider of supply chain solutions, has announced its acquisition of smart operations platform and IoT network company Qopper in a stock-and-cash transaction. The addition of Qopper’s technology will provide ParkourSC with digital twin, intelligence, collaboration and workflow-automation capabilities, the company notes. As part of the acquisition, ParkourSC has gained an additional site and team in Pune, India, to extend its Hyderabad operations.
Global supply chain disruption has pushed lean supply chains past their limit, ParkourSC explains, cutting into business profitability. As such, the company says, enterprises need to move beyond visibility to establish real-time digital supply chain operations and deliver rapid time to value, high scalability, and operationalized data, artificial intelligence and machine learning across their business operations. With ParkourSC’s platform, organizations can create digital twins of their supply chains with embedded intelligence and automation.
“The new capabilities Qopper brings to the ParkourSC platform helps us gain a unique and robust market position, putting us two to three years ahead of the competition, while allowing us to serve our customer needs better,” said Mahesh Veerina, ParkourSC’s CEO, in a prepared statement. “With our unique, category-defining platform, we can win market share and dramatically accelerate the digital journeys of our customers and their products.”
Qopper provides technology components that include IoT and contextual data integrations and large-scale platform-building and data-science capabilities to enable digital twins. These include catalog technology to model supply chain entities with dynamic attributes and contextual data; building blocks to build large-scale networks of digital twins to model the end-to-end value chain of an enterprise and any node in the network; embedded low-code/no-code intelligent recipes and AI/ML models at any node in the network to execute on event-based or constraint-based triggers; and the addition of chat, video, documents and other collaboration tools into workflows and automation.
“Qopper’s extensive experience and robust, market-tested technology bring critical capabilities to the ParkourSC platform, giving it a tremendous edge in the market,” said Alok Bhanot, ParkourSC’s CTO and executive VP, in the prepared statement. “I couldn’t be more excited to join the incredibly talented and dedicated team at ParkourSC helping organizations drive the supply chain resilience and growth they need to overcome current supply chain woes.”
RTLS Company Inpixon/IntraNav Joins SAP Partner Program
Inpixon has announced that IntraNav, which it acquired in 2021, has joined enterprise application software provider SAP‘s partner program. Inpixon offers indoor intelligence solutions designed to provide actionable insights for individuals, places and things via mapping, positioning and analytics.
Inpixon provides location-awareness, RTLS, workplace and hybrid event solutions, along with analytics, sensor fusion, and IIoT and IoT technologies. The SAP partner program allows IntraNav to share its intellectual property portfolio and market its smart factory, smart warehouse and digital supply chain solutions to SAP’s 440,000 worldwide customers. Program membership allows Inpixon to offer its solutions through the SAP Store.
“Companies can benefit from location-based automation of system bookings, control and acceleration of warehouse processes from inbound to outbound, synchronization of production cycles, and control of transport conditions and shipments for resilient supply chain management, as well as target-performance comparison of lead times,” said Andreas Radix, Inpixon’s executive VP of IIoT, in a prepared statement. “Together with our enterprise hybrid-cloud integrations for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, we deliver real-time location system cloud solutions to our customers to fulfill their requirements for a strategic RTLS framework that optimizes industrial enterprise business processes for Industry 4.0.”
Avnet, Amazon Forge IoT Strategic Collaboration
Avnet and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have forged a global strategic collaboration agreement to assist original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of IoT solutions in accelerating their time to market. This multi-year, joint investment will enable Avnet’s IoTConnect platform to deliver the breadth and depth of AWS’s portfolio of services, the companies report, creating a scalable, secure platform that preconfigures AWS’s services for application-specific usage.
According to Avnet, the IoTConnect platform helps OEMs designing connected solutions to improve time to market, scalability, reliability and security. The strategic collaboration provides the platform with access to AWS’s portfolio, including IoT, machine learning, analytics and compute services. Avnet’s customers will have access to an aggregated IoT development experience across AWS services, including IoT Core, IoT Greengrass, FreeRTOS, IoT Analytics and IoT SiteWise.
The collaboration will provide device provisioning, configuration and lifecycle management; multi-layer security; multi-protocol connectivity; integration of third-party services, API gateways and SDKs; business intelligence with data monitoring, analytics and notifications; and pre-built business applications. The platform will enable pre-integrated edge-to-cloud hardware designs and secure device and identity management. According to the company, the technology will offer OEMs scalable full-stack solutions that include hardware-agnostic edge designs, as well as tailored business applications and analytics.
“Today, Avnet lives at the intersection of connected technology by regularly working with leading hardware manufacturers and building our expertise at the edge and cloud. With our help, OEMs don’t have to go it alone to deliver simple, fast and secure IoT implementations,” said Lou Lutostanski, Avnet’s VP of IoT, in a prepared statement. “Our collaboration with AWS will help OEMs design, build, deploy and manage cloud connected devices, applications and solutions at scale.”
GS1 Australia Unveils New RFID Coalition
GS1 Australia has announced the formation of the RFID Coalition, which will help businesses implement RFID technology or investigate its benefits. GS1 Australia says RFID is gaining ground in Australia and abroad, and the coalition, according to its website, comprises “a group of likeminded companies, suppliers, solution providers and associations who have come together to collaborate and ensure that Australian supply chain remains competitive on a global scale. RFID technology is rapidly evolving and the ability to leverage its benefits are increasing.”
The RFID Coalition is focused on improving visibility within supply chains and boosting inventory accuracy through the implementation of standards and RFID technology. Working together in a non-competitive and neutral environment, its members share projects, experiences, solutions and case studies to benefit the industry. RFID, according to the coalition, “presents an amazing array of opportunities to help solve and improve a raft of existing and well-known issues. From stocktake to loss prevention, as well as improving the customer experience, RFID has already proven it can be the foundation for these projects and many more. This group is focused on understanding the benefits and accelerating the use of RFID technology within supply chain across Australia.”
“If the recent pandemic has taught business anything, it is that everyone wants what they want visible, available and accessible,” GS1 Australia said in a prepared statement. “You need to know where your stock is coming from, how much of it is available, where it is assigned, how it is getting there and when it gets there. Timing is everything now and patience, in business, is not a virtue. Implementing RFID requires an investment, yes, but the long-term benefits greatly outweigh the cost. Tagging now is not only more affordable, but it is fast becoming a compelling business case for many organizations.”
To form the RFID Coalition, GS1 Australia brought together retailers, brands, solution providers and trade associations to help the Australian supply chain keep up with global market and industry trends. Now the coalition is expanding beyond its retail focus to include other industries. The group meets quarterly to share projects, experiences, solutions and case studies, and to provide a forum for members to learn, network and nurture support in a non-competitive environment. The coalition will hold its annual in-person meeting on Aug. 24. For more information, visit the group’s website.