SML Group, a supply chain and retail technology solutions provider based in Hong Kong, has opened its new RFID Technology & Innovation Center in Clayton, N.C.—its first such facility based in the United States—for demonstrating radio frequency identification technology, testing solutions and enabling new innovations. Its opening occurs on the tails of a similar launch in Corby, England (see SML Group Adding New RFID Test Centers, Tag Manufacturing Capacity), and will be followed by the unveiling of a third center, in Hong Kong, scheduled to take place in spring 2015. The Clayton facility is located at the site of SML’s North American inlay manufacturing plant, which recently expanded its production capacity fourfold, according to Philip Calderbank, SML’s VP of global RFID.
The U.K. RFID Technology & Innovation Center has been serving SML’s existing and potential customers since its opening approximately six months ago, Calderbank says, by demonstrating the technology and enabling the companies to test RFID in the configurations they require for their own use cases.
The Clayton center is intended to further SML’s efforts to showcase its own innovations to existing and potential customers, Calderbank explains, and also serves as a location for the development of new ones. The firm opened its inlay production plant at the same site in February 2013 (see SML Group Announces New Tags, Production Center), to better meet the North American retail industry’s growing appetite for item-level tags. Since then, it has renovated the 34,000-square-foot, one-story building to not only expand production capacity but also house the technology center. There, it can display and test solutions through a replicated factory, distribution center and model storefront and backroom.
The center features a natural supply chain flow, by enabling the easy movement of visitors from one room to the next, thereby simulating the entire supply chain process. Though larger than the U.K. facility, Calderbank says, it is designed to provide the same functions as its British counterpart.
The simulations at the North Carolina and U.K. centers employ Xterprise‘s Clarity software, along with SML tags and readers, to show end users how the technology can track goods as they are first tagged at the manufacturing site, and then move through a warehouse, the back of a store, onto store shelves and through to the point of sale, says Paul Knepper, the marketing director of Xterprise, a controlling interest of which SML acquired in 2013 (see SML Group Buys Software Company Xterprise). The center also includes a laboratory containing an anechoic chamber that can be used to test the functionality of RFID tags and readers in stacked and hanging applications for retailers.
Additionally, the center offers what SML calls its RFID Training Academy, a program that customers can attend to learn about best practices and innovations in RFID, and to gain experience with SML tags and the Clarity software.
The reason Clarity works well in these demo centers, Knepper says, “is that the software is hardware-agnostic.” This, he explains, allows greater flexibility for end users to choose the appropriate configurations to best suit their needs. The technology center, he adds, can display various fixed and handheld configurations for receiving, auditing or other tasks, “all working on the same [Clarity] platform.”
Although Calderbank declines to reveal the number of inlays that the North Carolina site would produce, he says it will play an important role in SML’s company-wide expansion of EPC ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tag production growth. For example, he reports, throughout the past three years, the company has grown from producing no inlays to manufacturing 500 million annually. During the next three years, he says, it expects to further expand to producing 1.5 billion tags per year worldwide.