Aug. 4, 2003 – Cliff Horwitz, the chairman and CEO of SAMSys Technologies, doesn’t like the generic term “RFID reader.” The Canadian maker of RFID readers says the term implies that all readers are the same when, in fact, they can be as different from one another as a Ford pickup and a Caterpillar off-road truck.
SAMSys is all about providing different types of readers for different business applications. The Richmond Hill, Ontario, company, founded in 1995, is one of the few RFID companies that is publicly listed (its shares are traded on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol SMY). The company’s philosophy regarding the use of RFID in an open supply chain is simple: No single protocol and no one frequency can be used in every situation.
“It’s imperative to use the right frequency and the right protocol for the right applications,” says Horwitz. “The hardware has to be able to support a plurality of protocols and frequencies, and it has to be flexible. Otherwise, any investment in hardware is guaranteed to run into premature obsolescence.”
SAMSys offers readers that operate at low frequency (125 and 134 KHz), at high frequency (13.56 MHz) and at ultra-high frequency (915 MHz). Some readers are designed for specific applications, such as for reading items coming down a conveyor belt or those sitting on a retail or industrial smart shelf. All of the readers support a variety of proprietary and ISO protocols. The company’s 13.56 MHz reader also supports the Auto-ID Center’s Electronic Product Code specification, and SAMSys is adding EPC-capability to its UHF reader. What’s more, the protocols used by all of its readers can be upgraded remotely over a network.
SAMSys has also developed a “concentrator,” a device that supports a network of readers regardless of whether some are operating at 13.56 MHz and others at 915 MHz. The Interrogator Concentrator Control Module (ICCM), can control up to 256 readers, filter data and then pass on relevant information to enterprise applications via an Ethernet connection. The unit comes with or without a VGA display and costs about $2,000. “All of the readers operate with a single channel through the concentrator to the host, so that you are not tying up the server with unbelievable volume of information,” says Horwitz.
Armed with RFID readers for almost any application, SAMSys has begun to educate potential end users about which readers should be used in specific situations. It has created a showroom to demonstrate these different readers and launched a consulting service to do site surveys and help companies understand what problems or limitations they might come up against in their unique environment. And SAMSys has been forming alliances with integrators and value-added resellers (VARs) and training them to install RFID systems.
SAMSys has a research and development facility in the Research Triangle Park, just outside of Raleigh-Durham, N.C. Its RFID showroom is in a large room of the ground-floor office. The room has a retail smart shelf, an industrial smart shelf, a conveyor system, a forklift application and a portal set-up. The company’s readers are deployed in each of these vignettes to demonstrate how different frequencies and protocols can best be used.
Since it’s not always possible to fly customers in and walk them through the showroom, SAMSys installed a Webcam. As someone in the room removes boxes from the smart shelf or pushes a pallet through a portal, the company can demonstrate, live over the Web, not just how these systems work but how the readers can be controlled—and upgraded—remotely from anywhere in the world.
“We are using the network standards XML and SOAP, and we use HTML Web pages, so you can access any of the readers from any computer with a browser,” says Bill Davidson, SAMSys’s executive VP and chief technology officer. “I can do a check of what readers I have in there and do an inventory of the industrial smart shelf.”
From a laptop in a nearby conference room, Davidson demonstrates how a retail smart shelf can read a mix of tags, including Philips Semiconductors’ I-CODE, Texas Instrument’s Tag-It, and EPC tags. The portal reader picks up tags that use either ISO 18000-6 A or ISO 18000-6 B protocols. UHF readers can also read Intermec Intellitags and EM Microelectronic’s EM 4222 and EM 4022 tags.
To help customers or VARs install a reader network, SAMSys has developed an auto-find and auto-configure function for readers that are connected to its concentrator. From the Web browser, the company or the VAR can go into a reader and choose which protocols it should handle. System managers also can edit the reader’s network configurations, issue debug instructions, reboot the system and even turn on and off an audio beeper on the reader.
“This ability to control the readers over the Web is critical,” says Horwitz, “because as new protocols become available, you have to be able to do upgrades remotely. You don’t want to be sending an army of technicians out to do a special installation on each reader.”
The Auto-ID Center has promoted a vision where RFID tags contain only a serial number—an Electronic Product Code—and the data related to the item containing that code is stored in a database accessible via a wide-area network. Computers would pull information from the database and act on it. The reader in this scenario would simply grab the EPC and pass it on to a host system.
SAMSys believes more intelligence has to be incorporated in the RFID reader and concentrators attached to the wide-area network, instead of relying on computers on the network. As part of the company’s effort to make this a reality, SAMSys has designed its readers so they can run in several modes, such as add/remove. When set up in add/remove mode, a reader monitors inventory on a shelf and sends out a message to the host system only when something new is added or an item is removed from the shelf. This setup reduces the volume of data on the network and enables business processes to continue even when there is no network access, according to Tres Wiley, SAMSys’s chief operating officer.
“A material-handling system designed to use the EPC architecture must anticipate that there will be times when the connectivity between the reader and the host database servers doesn’t exist or is temporarily lost,” Wiley says. “In order for decisions to continue to be made in these situations, critical data will have to reside on the tag, and the reader will have to make decisions based upon the information contained on the tag. Otherwise, the system will grind to a halt, waiting for the critical information on a server to become available.”
SAMSys’s marketing strategy is to provide different readers and the ability to customize those readers so that customers can deploy an RFID system successfully, regardless of the application. The company has developed a small software application that a VAR could download and use to customize readers for different needs. For instance, in a recycling plant, a reader might scan a certain field on the tags and divert items coming down the conveyor in one direction or another. In a manufacturing plant, the readers could be set up to write data to a specific field to indicate that a process was complete.
The ability to load custom applications into the concentrator gives companies a very powerful tool for managing their operations. Let’s say a supermarket chain gets an alert that a shipment of beef en route to one of its store is being recalled. The chain could have a custom application filter data from all readers attached to a particular concentrator to find when that shipment arrives. The system could then trigger an alert to the store manager, so the shipment could be immediately pulled from circulation.
To help companies understand what types of RFID systems are best suited for their environment and application, SAMSys recently launched a consulting business. “This is something we feel strongly about, because this is the capability that is in shortest supply,” says Horwitz. “We will not do business consulting or back-end integration. Those are already well catered to. The missing component is expertise in understanding the issue of how to get power to the tag.”
“Some of the business case studies that have been done in early applications created some unrealistic expectations for the technology,” explains Wiley. “When you come in to do the RFID consulting, you have to undo some of those expectations and keep focused on the things you can do well and not allow yourself to be pulled into the excitement of the technology. That’s the challenge for the industry—not to overpromise and to deliver on what we do promise.”
Horwitz and Wiley believe that to adopt RFID successfully, an individual company must first find benefits within its own operations. After the company has achieved that, it can then gradually extend RFID out to key partners and eventually across the supply chain. “Each of the enterprises that intends to implement RFID needs to understand fully what it can expect functionally, and then it can explore the opportunities that there might be for leveraging that to its suppliers and customers,” says Horwitz. “To start off with too grandiose a plan, a plan that has too many moving parts—you find yourself getting into a gridlock situation.”
SAMSys advocates that companies keep it simple. “You must define specifically those areas of an application where RFID can be brought to bear in a given enterprise, quantify the benefits that will accrue and then justify the investment to be made,” Horwitz says. “That becomes the starting point for any expansion of the application.”
In addition to providing consulting services, SAMSys has been forming alliances with VARs both in the United States and Europe. SAMSys typically provides its readers to the VARs, along with training so they can be installed properly. In that way, customers get a broader array of readers that can be used for different applications.
These relationships cover a broad array of potential applications. For instance, in November, SAMSys signed a deal with VeriCode Systems, a systems integrator based in Bolingbrook, Ill., that provides systems design, installation and integration for automatic data capture systems in warehouses. It also partnered with Alpha Software, a Richmond, Va., consulting company that provides RFID systems for tracking drums, pallets, small tools and other items used in the utility industry.
Although it will be several years before individual retailed goods have RFID tags, SAMSys teamed up with LG and P In-Store, a Montvale, N.J., company that designs and manufacturers merchandising displays, to begin developing smart shelves (see SAMSys Eyes Smart Shelf Market). And in May, it signed a VAR agreement with HEI (formerly Cross Technology), a Victoria, Minn., company specializing in the custom design and manufacturing of microelectronics packaging and subsystems
SAMSys also has made in-roads into Europe. The company signed a VAR agreement with Intellident, one of the most experienced RFID systems integrators in England. It inked a similar deal with Scanology, a Dutch company that installs auto-ID systems. And SAMSys is even pushing into Asia. In March, it expanded an existing relationship with a Singaporean RFID channel development company called Tunity to include a VAR agreement.
“The response has been phenomenal,” says Horwitz. “We are getting a steady flow of opportunities from the VARs we signed up in Europe. We are managing internally our own strategies to now better avail ourselves of the opportunities we have in working through those VARs.”
The VARs in Europe are more knowledgeable about RFID than those in North America, according to Horwitz, so the company has been working to bring data-capture firms in the United States and Canada up to speed. “They have access to an existing customer base, and they have a tried-and-tested reputation that their customers will rely on,” he says. “But their own lack of technical know-how in RFID has held them back.”
SAMSys has been working with these partners to educate them not just about how radio waves behave in different environments but also about what questions need to be answered before they start the selling process. “Many companies are used to selling bar code equipment out of a catalog,” Horwitz says. “That’s not the approach for RFID today. You have to do a lot of tailoring, and that’s what we’re helping the VARs to understand.”