Beaver Street Fisheries stands to benefit from Wal-Mart's RFID mandate
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
A lot of manufacturers are quietly griping about the edict that soon will require RFID tags on all goods bound for Wal-Mart. But not Beaver Street Fisheries. The Jacksonville, Fla.-based distributor of frozen seafood volunteered to join Wal-Mart's 100 largest suppliers in meeting a January 2005 deadline for placing RFID tags on all cases and pallets shipped to the retailer's Dallas-area distribution centers.
"Our deadline would have been January 2005," says Howard Stockdale, CIO for Beaver Street, "but we decided to start early because we have other customers, including the Department of Defense, that were going to require this as well."
Stockdale says being an early adopter of RFID also gives Beaver Street a head start on learning how it can benefit from using this technology. "Of course, we would rather not spend the 35 or 40 cents it costs to put those labels on all our products and not be able to make up for it by raising prices," Stockdale says. "But if we use this technology properly, it will pay off down the road. We gain efficiencies to increase our business without adding more people.
"We aren't even trying to convince ourselves that we can get immediate ROI," Stockdale adds. "The ROI will come from being in position to take advantage of the technology when it comes into widespread use."
At that point, Stockdale envisions Beaver Street being able to issue print commands for RFID tags at the same time it generates a PO to buy a certain product and have those tags printed at the supplier's facility. The tags would carry data that would allow Beaver Street to acknowledge the product's arrival at Beaver Street's warehouse and then move it to the shipping dock with little or no manual intervention.
Stockdale's vision is based on research done in preparation for meeting the Wal-Mart mandate. That research has involved multiple technology partners—includingThe Danby Group, a systems integrator specializing in automatic data collection projects; Franwell, a supplier of RFID middleware and related products; and Zebra Technologies, a manufacturer of bar-code and RFID-label printers.
Upon assembling this team, Stockdale says, "We established an RFID lab that is doing work on two separate paths." The first path led to construction of what Stockdale calls a "portable slap-and-ship station" that produces RFID tags that can be placed on product cases and pallets according to Wal-Mart's specifications.
The station consists of a short conveyor line with product pallets at each end. When a case of goods is placed on the first pallet, a worker goes to a PC running a Franwell program called RFID Genesis to create the appropriate RFID label and send a command to print the label to a Zebra printer. When the case arrives at the other end of the conveyor, the label is taken from the Zebra printer and placed on the case. An RFID reader at that end of the station verifies that the tag is working properly and the case goes to the shipping dock.
"Right now, we do all this manually, and we can't integrate the data from the tags with our warehouse management system to improve efficiency," says Stockdale, "but we are compliant with the Wal-Mart program," adding that Beaver Street is now making regular shipments of tilapia and orange roughy with RFID labels to Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, finding other ways of exploiting the technology continues in the other part of Beaver Street's RFID lab.
"There are no best practices in this area," Stockdale says. "But we believe the promise of RFID is everything people have been talking about: improved supply chain velocity, and greater efficiencies. Our job is to figure out how to make those things happen for our company. That's why we have embraced the Wal-Mart initiative."
