Inventory / Warehouse Management
AT&T Introduces Managed RFID Service
AT&T is the latest technology giant to enter the RFID industry. Through a partnership with Symbol, BEA, and Intel, the company last week announced a managed RFID service that it hopes will "accelerate mass adoption" of the technology.Analyst: Sense and Respond Goes Beyond RFID
In this guest column, Manufacturing Insights' Bob Ferrari argues that while RFID will be the most significant disruptive technology for enabling the sense and respond supply chain, it is but one piece of the overall solution, and a piece whose current costs still present an ROI challenge.Item-Level RFID Firm TAGSYS Lands $35m
Item-level tagging specialist TAGSYS today made two major company announcements: the first that it received $35 million in financing, the second that it will relocate its headquarters from France to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.Report: Both HF and UHF RFID Will Exist at Item Level
Cambridge-based research firm IDTechEx this week released a report on the debate between high frequency (HF) RFID and ultrahigh frequency (UHF) RFID for use at the item level.RFID Practices of Manufacturers and Retailers Diverge
ARC Advisory Group's Chantal Polsonetti argues in this guest column that manufacturers should not necessarily emulate the RFID deployment practices of retailers but instead forge their own techniques that may include flexible RFID readers rather than fixed and moving beyond the use of printer/encoders.Key Findings from RFID Reader Benchmark
ODIN technologies has released the latest in its RFID hardware benchmark series, this one covering Gen2 readers. The , sponsored by Unisys, includes the test results and analysis of seven RFID readers currently in production. RFID Update spoke with ODIN's chief operating officer Bret Kinsella about the findings.Cardinal Health’s RFID Adoption Expands
Cardinal Health, the $75 billion medical distributor and supplier, yesterday announced that it is moving into the next phase of its end-to-end RFID pilot. It will now begin tagging pharmaceuticals at the item, case, and pallet levels.New RFID Standard Groups at EPCglobal
Standards body EPCglobal has announced the formation of two new working groups: the HF Air Interface Working Group and the UHF Air Interface Working Group. The former will focus on creating a Gen2 standard of HF, and the latter will work to extend the existing Gen2 capabilities to better support item-level tagging.First RFID Item-Level Tagged Store Opens
Yesterday Dutch book retailer Boekhandels Groep Nederland (BGN) opened what it calls the world's first item-level tagged store. Every book in the Almere, Netherlands-based SmartStore has a Rafsec Gen2 tag attached to it. Another item-level tagged BGN SmartStore is slated to open in October. Progress Software led the deployment.