Vendors respond to high-price deployment concerns with hosted RFID apps
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
IBM Global Services' new hosted RFID service targets an estimated 70,000 small and midsize manufacturers that must respond to RFID mandates from Wal-Mart, the Department of Defense (DOD), and others by 2007. The service is intended to lower the initial investment required to attain basic slap-and-ship capability.
IBM's move is part of a larger trend that has attracted the interest of numerous vendors—such as Unisys, AT&T(see more, p. 53), and Seeburger—that are tailoring RFID services meant to decrease initial investment for companies that want to begin RFID-tagging goods in the supply chain.
"Current solutions are too complex and costly for many small and midsize manufacturers, requiring on-site staffing to run an RFID implementation," says Dave Chapman, senior consultant for IBM Global Services. "Our solution allows them to implement RFID [without shouldering] the entire technology and investment burden themselves."
For a one-time fee of $20,000, a manufacturer receives a bar-code scanner and RFID printer linked by a virtual private network connection with IBM's hosted RFID software running remotely on a dedicated blade server. The customer scans bar codes on product casing on-site and transmits the codes to the IBM system, which converts it to electronic product code (EPC) RFID tag data. That data is subsequently retransmitted to the customer's printer where RFID tags are generated for slap-and-ship processes. The customer pays a monthly fee of $750 for help-desk support and remote-system monitoring to maintain peak performance.
"The service enables stand-alone slap-and-ship very quickly," says Chapman. "It frees [the user] from having to keep up with the technology as it changes over time. The solution is built on IBM WebSphere software, so if a user wants to migrate down the road to a local solution, they can load it on their own server without any data or software migration."
The service does not offer integration with back-end systems at the customer site, which would facilitate automatic updates of inventory and shipping status. Rather, says Chapman, "The software allows them to manually put cases with pallets so that they could, in effect, get the same results."
Aforementioned vendors that are expanding on software-as-service report the following developments:
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Unisys has signed a deal to provide Thomasville Furniture Industries' Appomattox, Va.-based distribution center with comprehensive help-desk and field support for RFID hardware and software. Thomasville employed a local system integrator to design and implement the system to support mandates by Target and Wal-Mart, but turned to Unisys for services support. Unisys is leveraging its 10-year RFID services support for DoD tracking of the military supply chain.
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AT&T is looking to extend its IP network and Internet Data Center-related expertise to support on-site RFID infrastructures. This represents an outgrowth of services already offered in assisting customers in piecing together custom RFID solutions. AT&T will now provide network consulting and integration services, IP transport, hosting, storage, managed applications, and security in a single managed RFID service.
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Seeburger's IDnet hosted RFID services are powered by the vendor's own RFID Workbench, which provides data management, label encoding, printing, verification procedures, automatic generation and transmission of advance shipping notices, and transaction-records maintenance. Tag printing can be performed at the customer site or through a third-party service bureau.
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