Today kicked off the EPCGlobal U.S. conference at the convention center in Baltimore, with EPC Essentials Day. Most of the afternoon devoted to the history and basics of RFID. After the first couple of sessions, there was a quick hands-on demo where we looked at some different types of tags, and we were given cute notepads made to look like pallets, each adorned with a decal of a Pringle's can and an Alien Class 1 EPC tag. We moved from booth to booth scanning the "pallet" at a mock manufacturer, distributor and retailer.
The last session was the most interesting for me when Milan Turk of P&G, Ian Robertson of HP and Jamshed Dubash of Gillette each shared lessons learned from their pilot efforts. The general consensus was that tag yields (tags that work after being written once) and tag longevity were still too poor for production systems but that they had improved greatly in the last year, with improvements as large as 20% failure dropping to 1%.
The best insight from Turk was that pilots should be focused on answering specific questions and all pilots should be "Run in the conference room first." He even suggested video taping the environment where the deployment will take place to spot unexpected things like personnel movement or potential reflective surfaces.
Some of the best insights from Roberts were that every implementation is different, even if the buildings seem to be identical, and that an RFID implementation had to be open to making mistakes and learning from them because the variables are so complex. He also made a point that association (recognizing a whole wrapped pallet by reading any carton on it) was an effective and desirable approach rather than trying for full-pallet reads and emphasized finding reader vendors who have on-site support everywhere the technology will be deployed.
Dubash made a point of saying that, in his opinion, read rates of 100% were possible in production conditions for individual cases on a conveyor, but reliable full-pallet reads of products were beyond the current technology and probably would be for some time due to factors like reflective packaging and mixed pallets. He argued that business processes should focus on 100% data verification as opposed to 100% read rates.
All of these presentations and the ones from the sessions over the week are supposed to be posted at the link below Friday, October 8.
(More Tomorrow)
Conference Presentations