Apr 15, 2014Last week, the United States Department of Defense (DOD) awarded Savi a five-year contract as the sole provider to the RFID-IV program (contract #: W52P1J-14-D-0014). The award reaffirms Savi's longstanding leadership in providing radio frequency identification solutions to the military. The RFID-IV award follows the $204 million solicitation issued by the DOD in September 2013 to support the Product Director Automated Movement and Identification Solutions (PD AMIS) mission. As the initial RFID-IV contract, it establishes a $102 million ceiling for Savi to provide the DOD and other agencies with a comprehensive array of hardware and software products, including active RFID (aRFID) sensors, readers, real-time location systems (RTLS), satellite communication (SATCOM) and related solutions for global asset planning and the tracking of personnel, equipment and sustainment cargo worldwide.
During last week's RFID Journal LIVE! 2014 conference and exhibition, one of the event's keynote speakers mistakenly suggested that RFID-IV was "under protest," which U.S. Army Contracting Command quickly denied. When asked for clarification regarding the keynote presentation, the contracting officer for RFID-IV stated, "As the contracting officer for the aRFID-IV contract, I can say that as of today, I have not been informed about any protests."
Savi is the only company to be selected as a prime contractor on all four of the RFID-named contracts (RFID-I, -II and -III), and has now been named the sole provider twice (RFID-II and -IV). Over the course of the first three RFID contracts—which had a combined ceiling of more than $1 billion—Savi won more than 97 percent of all awards, totaling more than 61 percent of the combined ceiling.
"Throughout our 25-year history, Savi has maintained a strong partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), and the dedicated personnel responsible for the sophisticated tasks of automatic identification, transportation and logistics tracking across the armed services around the globe," says Bill Clark, the company's president and chief executive officer. "Being selected to fulfill the requirements of RFID-IV reflects Savi's longstanding history as the pioneer, innovator and inventor of technologies, products and protocols that facilitate the use of sensors to improve operational analysis, efficiency and insight—and reaffirms our leadership status as the premier provider of both military RFID systems and the enabler of critical asset-tracking capabilities on an enormous scale."
In conjunction with the DOD award, Savi introduced nine new active RFID products, including sensors, readers and portable deployment kits that deliver immediate and dramatic advances in storage capacity, performance and usability. The new hardware makes it possible for organizations to rapidly establish a complete aRFID system in any environment, as well as increase the speed of data capture and ultimately collect more sensor data to improve efficiency, reduce risk and more confidently manage operations. The hardware also meets the requirements of the DOD's RFID-IV contract.
"RFID-IV is a crucial element to the AMIS vision of a DOD-wide enterprise that leverages identification and information technologies to enable efficient use of global asset planning and the movement and tracking of personnel, equipment and sustainment cargo from home station to destination and back," says Jim Alexander, Savi's AMIS product director. "The AMIS mission to provide the DOD with AIT and RFID products and services continues realization through this contract award."
Savi pioneered, patented and currently licenses the ISO 18000-7 RFID protocol used by the DOD and its allies worldwide for logistics and asset tracking. Savi's hardware and software components are integrated into every aspect of the DOD Radio Frequency In-Transit Visibility (RF-ITV) network, the world's largest RFID-enabled asset-visibility system, which tracks material as it moves through the DOD supply chain. Allied military units, including NATO and the Australian Defence Force, also utilize Savi solutions. Savi's military RFID solutions are deployed in 52 countries, monitor more than 4 million sensors and include 4,600 read-write sites and 32,000 mobile readers.
Rosemary Johnston is the VP of federal sales and strategy at Savi, where she oversees operations, sales operations, systems support and governance assistance. Her understanding of the military supply chain and logistics market comes from her career in commercial enterprises and her 23-year service in the U.S. Air Force, during which she was responsible for the development of key wartime logistics planning concepts, the establishment of supply policies that impacted the depth and breadth of retail and wholesale supply, and the conducting of a number of planning and forecasting analyses.
