Making the Case for RFID
With a delay in e-pedigree laws, pharmaceutical companies can take the time to
consider a range of tracking and tracing technologies, including RFID.
In some ways, RFID Journal Live felt
more like a business
conference rather
than a tech show. RFID
technology was, of
course, the event’s main
focus. But exhibitors
and speakers weren’t
explaining how the
technology works as
much as they were justifying the business case
for RFID adoption.
Terms such as business
value, return on invest-
Daphne Allen
ment, and even fast followers were heard at a number of
booths and conferences.
“It was never about RFID—it was
about getting better business value,”
said Anush Kumar, senior product
manager, Microsoft Biz Talk Server
RFID, of Microsoft’s development of
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 during the
opening keynote address April 16.
“Visibility is the key enabler in sticking together elements in an enterprise
that stretches around the world in
supply chains,” he said.
Biz Talk RFID enables such visibility by managing the various sensors
that capture auto ID data and making [that] data relevant for business
events, Kumar added. His colleague
Steve Sloan, lead product manager in
the connected systems division, later
added that Biz Talk RFID Mobile
“supports standards, letting the
industry decide. It eliminates the
need to install drivers when bringing
on new readers.”
To develop an end-to-end business solution,
Microsoft teamed up
with HP and SAP.
“We’re not looking at
this in silos,” Kumar is
quoted as saying in a
white paper from the
trio. “We’re looking at
an entirety. Any real-time data that [come] to
or from the edge of the
enterprise [need] to be
incorporated into
actionable results from a backend
execution perspective.”
Nancy Anderson, CEO of Blue
Vector Systems, also spoke of the
“Clarity in operations [has]
measurable competitive
advantages,” said Dean
Frew of Xterprise.
business value of item visibility in her
session, “Improving Production, Shipping, and Receiving Processes with
RFID,” on April 17. “Product in the
supply chain spends the majority of its
time in a blind spot,” she told atten-
dees. The key is to “find the problem
as it occurs in handling, give specific
feedback to the operator, and fix it
before shipping. At this stage, it is still a
free fix. But after shipping the wrong
product, it becomes costly to fix it.”
While Anderson offered examples
during her talk of how Blue Vector’s
Edge Manager technology works at
dock doors to ensure that the “right
products are on the right trucks in the
right order,” the company also
launched its Serialization Station for
pharmaceutical packaging and inspection operations, among other locales.
Supporting both bar codes and RFID
(in high and ultrahigh frequencies), the
mobile station aggregates items into
cases, totes, pallets, orders, and shipments. It also can create initial pedigrees and verify pedigrees of incoming
products.
Kumar’s keynote cospeaker, Dean
Frew, CEO of Xterprise, spoke of
building a “high-definition enterprise”
in which “things have unique identity.”
The result is “data with context,” giving companies “new capabilities to
solve business problems.” Such “clarity
in operations [has] measurable competitive advantages,” he said. (He
opened his talk, by the way, by saying
that “it is about business value—not
about the technology.”)
“The bigger excitement is not in
mandated compliance, but in [demon-strating] where the business value lies,”
said Scott Burroughs, a Solutions
Executive in the Sensor and Actuator
