Q&A: Sara Lee wrestles with RFID, looks for benefits
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Ray Hagedorn, an IT manager at Sara Lee Foods, said in an interview that the company is taking a 'slap and ship' approach to its use of RFID tags while it learns more about the technology and looks for ways the tags can provide business benefits.
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Enterprises face dual 2005 deadlines relating to RFID and supply-chain data synchronization. Those that haven&#39;t moved forward with a product-information-management strategy will be under-prepared to realize RFID&#39;s value.
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Nokia&#39;s RFID system offers consumers access to browsing and text message services by touching tags that contain service shortcuts.
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(InfoWorld) - IAnywhere SolutionsÂ is adding location tracking capabilities and support for a wider range of sensor technologies in RFID Anywhere 3.0, the latest version of its sensor management software announced on Monday. The previous versions of RFID Anywhere allowed customers to collect data from RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, create reports with that data and integrate the data with other enterprise applications. With the latest version of the software platform, companies can collect more data including location and environmental information from a variety of technologies including active RFID, passive RFID, RTLS (Real Time Location System) and barcode into a single reporting and tracking system. Previously, customers using a variety of sensor and tracking mechanisms would use separate management software tools to monitor each technology, said Martyn Mallick, director of RFID and mobile solutions for iAnywhere. Passive RFID is theÂ technology used by Wal-Mart StoresÂ and other retailers to track products or pallets of products as they move through the distribution system. Active RFID chips can hold more data and can be read from a greater distance. RTLS is used primarily to track and find items, such as computers or medical equipment. RTLS sensors often communicate with Wi-Fi networks. RFID Anywhere 3.0 users can also collect environmental data. Some active RFID tags now include light, temperature and humidity sensors, Mallick said. By collecting that data along with tracking and location information, users can make better business decisions, he said. For example, a produce shipper can decide to send a load of lettuce that has been exposed to above-optimum temperatures to a local retailer where it can be bought and consumed quickly, rather than send it across the country, potentially taking days for it to reach store shelves. RFID Anywhere 3.0 is integrated with existing RTLS location and active RFID systems, collecting data from software from Ekahau, AeroScout, RF Code, and others. Collecting information from thousands of tags can produce an overwhelming amount of data, but RFID Anywhere allows users to set parameters to help control the flow. "The most important thing we recommend really to customers is that not all the data is valuable," Mallick said. "Typically 75 percent to 80 percent of data can be filtered out because it's not of value." Some data may only be useful for one or two days, after which it can be deleted. Other data doesn't actually need to be collected. For example, if a product is sitting on a shelf, its sensor doesn't need to repeatedly send data saying that it hasn't moved. The sensor reader can instead be programmed only to send data once the product moves, he said. RFID Anywhere 3.0 will become available later this month. Customers can deploy the software in as many sites as they want, paying based on how many data collection devices are connected to the network.
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This company has just started using some new RF guns in its warehouse. Workers use the handheld terminals to scan RFID tags on the conveyor -- or at least they're supposed to.
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It&#39;s been a bit more than two years since Ambuj Goyal launched IBM&#39;s Information on Demand strategy, an effort by the company to bring together a virtual menagerie of data management, access, and analysis software under a single heading.Goyal, general manager of information management in IBM&#39;s Software Group, has driven the effort partly through a seemingly relentless series of acquisitions.One of IBM&#39;s highest-profile grabs is undoubtedly its&#160;pending deal to purchase business intelligence vendor Cognos for $5 billion. It&#39;s also bought niche companies such as&#160;Solid Information Technology, a company that makes an in-memory database, and&#160;Princeton Softech, a data archiving firm.A central pillar in the strategy is IBM&#39;s Information Server, released in October. It is an integration platform for combining data from a variety of heterogenous sources.The company has yet to develop its own packaged enterprise applications, choosing to tackle that lucrative business through partnerships. Instead, IBM&#39;s goal is to become the leading supplier of a data infrastructure designed to make those applications more effective.IBM&#39;s core target remains large enterprises faced with an avalanche of business data, and there is plenty of opportunity here, according to IT analyst Judith Hurwitz: &quot;I think we&#39;re just scratching the surface of what companies want to do.&quot;For example, she said, &quot;Companies have to do [RFID tags] because companies like Wal-Mart insist upon it. They&#39;ve got all this RFID data, and they&#39;re not doing anything with it. The question is, is there a way they can actually start using that RFID data to make better business decisions?&quot;Goyal and his teams might tell you that they&#39;re trying their best to answer that question. In a recent interview at IBM&#39;s Somers, New York, facility, the executive painted his IOD strategy as a roaring success, yet one still in its earliest stages.IDGNS: From a business standpoint, how has the Information on Demand strategy played out so far?Goyal: It couldn&#39;t be better. The success ... has helped not only the information management software, but the Software Group and IBM as a company.... The Cognos acquisition alone is $5 billion. We would not be allowed to do that, the shareholders and board would not allow us to do that, unless we had made a return on our investment.IDGNS: You&#39;ve assembled a dramatic array of data-centric technologies but still aren&#39;t in the packaged ERP, CRM application business. Why?Goyal: Our strategy remains that we are not in the ERP, CRM space. We are not in the applications business, of that kind. There is the market for automation and the market for optimization. Automation is about having an application agenda. I either build custom applications with COBOL or Java, or I do packaged applications, or I do [service-oriented architecture] to say, &#39;I already have applications, let me get a combined application or composite application.&#39;That&#39;s a market for consolidation now. That&#39;s not where the growth is. What a lot of people are saying now is, &#39;Hey I&#39;ve automated the call center, can I improve my per-customer profitability?&#39; It&#39;s not about automation, it&#39;s about optimizing my business, and that&#39;s all about leveraging information.Even in China, the automation market is saturated. Everywhere, we are seeing the automation market is saturating. There are a lot of projects going on in automation, don&#39;t get me wrong. But in that market, people have made their decisions. Now people are saying, how can I optimize?We don&#39;t do supply chain software, but we make supply chain software better. We don&#39;t do core banking, but we make core banking better. That&#39;s the optimization market. It&#39;s a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollars&#39; worth of market. That&#39;s where the world is starting to go.IDGNS: So who are you competing with?Goyal: It&#39;s not who, but what segment. All these companies have become very, very big. When we work with HP, some of IBM&#39;s business provides services and software on HP&#39;s hardware, and our hardware business competes with HP. Same thing with databases: We fight against Oracle. But when we work with Siebel and Peoplesoft, we work with Oracle.IDGNS:&#160;Microsoft just made an offer for Fast Search and Transfer, a high-end, pureplay enterprise search vendor. They clearly see it as a growth business. How important is search within the IOD strategy?Goyal: Search to me is an ingredient technology. People don&#39;t buy search. People buy improved interaction with a client. [Search] is an ingredient technology that helps me solve a particular problem. People tell me Yahoo and Google are in the search business. They&#39;re not, they&#39;re in the advertising business. Search is just an ingredient technology that they use. With everything we do in Information on Demand ... search will be one of the ingredient technologies to leverage structured information and unstructured information.IDGNS: Are you done buying companies?Goyal: If history is an indication of what we have done over the past seven years, we can predict the future. You can answer your own question as to whether I&#39;m done buying companies.We are now in the optimization space, where two decades ago the world was in the automation space. When JD Edwards came out, when the first sense of ERP started to emerge, and so on.We feel from a basic truth perspective we are in the best position. We now have information integration, master data management, we have BI, data warehousing, databases, content management, we have search.But the journey of optimization has just begun. It will take us in ways we don&#39;t understand, even today. We are going after information on demand in real time. Sub-second, sub-millisecond response times to a question asked in a call center and delivering information just in time to optimize a business process or a human decision. So this is a two-decade journey.
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Tracking inventory using inexpensive radio tags is one of the hottest technologies in supply chain management, with promising applications in retail and many other sectors.
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CNET News.com recently ran a report on companies with technologies that involve implanting RFID chips under people&#39;s skin or inside a bracelet.
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A year after its acquisition by a $40 billion behemoth, an RFID pioneer may have finally found a proper home.
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Radio controlled dust devils Tiny Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips, 64 times smaller than current devices, have been developed by Hitatchi in Japan.â¦
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Radio Frequency Identification technology is going to ring in the new year in more ways than one.
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The first indication that the value of RFID (radio frequency identification) will extend beyond the supply warehouse was shown last week by WhereNet, a provider of wireless location and communications technology.
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SINGAPORE has been one of the earliest countries to make use of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. The Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantries use RFID to detect the cars that pass through them.
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(Source: AT&T)  RFID: A Business Revolution Providing Strategic and Competitive Advancements in radio frequency identification technology are causing big changes in supply chain management.
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In the increasingly competitive RFID arena, IBM on Thursday will release the first three products from its recently formed $250 million S&amp;A (Sensor &amp; Actuator) arm.
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Ziff Davis - Despite significant RFID adoption from the biggest companies, IBM is turning its attention to the midmarket.
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As a standards-setting body readies a protocol for radio frequency identification, known as RFID, a bid for royalties from a holder of critical patents has threatened to disrupt the smooth rollout of a technology that could spawn one of the decade's biggest industries.