Jump-start your RFID program
Boeing, Airbus among manufacturers finding solutions for accelerated RFID deployments
By Sidney Hill, Jr., executive editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
It's no secret that Chicago-based Boeing and the French company Airbus are bitter corporate rivals. In fact, the acrimony permeating their ongoing race to build a next-generation wide-body jet airliner has become quite public, with each company accusing the other of getting unfair subsidies from their respective governments.
So why and how did these two dogged adversaries cooperate on development of an RFID solution for the aerospace industry?
The why is simple, according to Jens Heitman, senior manager of system and equipment standardization for Airbus.
"Seventy percent of our suppliers are the same," says Heitman. "For many parts, there is only one worldwide supplier. We also have the same customers, so we are working together to set industry standards. The idea is for everyone to get a faster return on their RFID investments."
The quest for faster ROI is driving a lot of RFID-related activity these days. Technology vendors, especially, have picked up on this idea, as evidenced by the number of RFID "starter kits" flooding the market. These products generally are geared toward helping companies launch RFID programs that comply with requirements laid out by industry channel masters, such as Wal-Mart in the retail/consumer packaged goods space.
The Boeing/Airbus joint solution is a Web-based service called Antenna, through which aerospace manufacturers can find out what standards Boeing and Airbus expect their suppliers to use when deploying RFID technology. Antenna also alerts suppliers whenever Boeing or Airbus changes an RFID requirement.
Antenna was developed via a partnership between Siemens and a relatively small product life-cycle management (PLM) software supplier called Sopheon. The service revolves around an advanced search engine that is part of Sopheon's PLM product. Siemens first used the search engine to drive a service called Compliance Direct, which gives manufacturers the information they need to ensure products comply with engineering specifications or customer requirements.
A compliance tool
"This search technology enables compliance management or compliance analysis by doing word-for-word comparisons on multiple documents," says Huub Rutten, Sopheon's VP of R&D. "It can help manufacturers in two ways. In product engineering, it verifies that products comply with design specifications. And in procurement, it validates that suppliers' products comply with standards and specifications."
Siemens interviews all customers signed up for Compliance Direct to determine the set of documents or other information that should be placed in a database to answer possible questions from the users. Once the database is compiled, Siemens connects it to the Sopheon search engine. Siemens also does the work required to connect users to the service, and teaches users how to conduct queries.
Siemens and Sopheon negotiated a truce between Boeing and Airbus to get both aircraft manufacturers' input on what data sources should feed the Antenna service. But as Heitman points out, "The collaboration only involves questions about standardization. We can take different approaches to implementing the technology. We can give users different data fields. We can structure query processes so that users get answers faster from one company than the other."
Despite potential differences in implementation, the information users get from the Antenna service will be the same.
"Airbus and Boeing worked on this service together because all of their suppliers need to be in compliance with RFID standards as soon as possible," Rutten says. "This is a portal everyone can use to see the same data and speak the same language."
Ben Desjardins, a marketing manager with VeriSign, says it's crucial for companies within the same industry to speak the same language when it comes to RFID because "the sharing of information between trading partners is what will accelerate the ROI from RFID."
So far, most companies only have vague ideas about what type of information they want to share via RFID, beyond acknowledging that a product has been shipped from, or received at, a specific location. But Desjardins and other industry experts believe the possibilities for transmitting useful information over RFID networks is limitless.
Enhancing sensors
IBM recently announced it is investing $250 million in developing methods for deploying RFID. According to Keith Rainer, a senior RFID architect, IBM believes RFID offers a way of enhancing the value of factory sensors—the devices that monitor performance of production machinery.
"The use of RFID is about identifying objects in the real world. That's different than the typical sensor, which can measure things like the temperature of a refrigerator, but can't identify the refrigerator," Rainer says. "RFID adds the capability to distinguish between objects in the factory. That means if the temperature or pressure on a machine isn't where it should be, the RFID tag will allow managers to immediately identify which machine is having a problem and take the appropriate corrective action."
Extending that possibility to the supply chain, having RFID linked to objects such as refrigerated trucks could enable distribution-center managers to reject shipments if the history recorded on an RFID tag shows that the truck's temperature dropped to an unacceptable level in transit.
VeriSign is playing a crucial role in building networks for sharing RFID data. It has a contract to manage traffic on the EPCglobal Network, the primary conduit for moving RFID data in retail supply chains. A Lawrenceville, N.J.-based nonprofit group called EPCglobal—which created the electronic product code, or EPC, as the standard message format for RFID data—established the network.
VeriSign also is the primary traffic director on the Internet, and it is using the same infrastructure that manages Internet traffic to route product-related information pulled from RFID tags.
For RFID, VeriSign created the Object Naming Service, or ONS, to issue product codes and route requests for information about those codes. When a manufacturer decides to deploy RFID in its supply chain, it contacts EPCglobal for an electronic product code. EPCglobal passes all assigned codes to VeriSign, which puts them into a central database that can be accessed via the Internet. When someone in the supply chain scans an RFID tag, VeriSign routes the message to the appropriate manufacturer's system, which processes the request and sends the information back to the appropriate party.
Data sharing, simplified
Desjardins says EPCglobal Network will save companies from "having to exchange massive files of data for every supply chain event. Instead, when they have a question, they can use the product code and the associated network to get the details they require."
As the use of RFID spreads and brings more traffic to EPCglobal Network, Desjardins expects companies to get a better handle on the types of information they want to exchange. In the meantime, he advises companies to make sure their internal network infrastructures can support data sharing via RFID technology. He also points to VeriSign for a service for building RFID-ready networks.
This service, which VeriSign calls its EPC Starter Kit, consists of two components. The first is an ONS account, which will handle all requests for information relating to a manufacturer's EPC code. Desjardins likens this to "a database on the EPCglobal Network to handle all of your trading partners' requests for information."
The second component is EPC Information Service (EPCIS), which gives users repositories for storing product information that can be accessed by scanning an RFID tag.
Users pay a monthly fee to access these services, which reside on VeriSign's network. Desjardins says VeriSign adopted this model for a couple of reasons.
"Most companies still are in the pilot stage when it comes to RFID," Desjardins explains. "Our services help complete those pilots without building a huge infrastructure. Also, since RFID standards are still evolving, we don't recommend making huge investments in solutions that are not standards-based. Our services will evolve with the standards."
ObjectStore, a division of Progress Software, has adapted technology used by Wall Street program traders to power its RFID Accelerator package. Mark Palmer, a VP for ObjectStore, says the system uses Reuters data feeds to monitor price movements of all stocks traded on public exchanges—a total of 5,000 to 50,000 transactions a second. "It then runs algorithms against that data to tell users when to make trades," Palmer says. "The entire process takes less than two seconds.
"RFID presents a similar challenge for processing and analyzing data," Palmer continues. "Both passive and active RFID tags transmit relatively simple sets of information, but they transmit a lot of it. The trick for those of us in the software industry is finding ways of extracting meaningful business intelligence from that raw data."
Palmer believes ObjectStore has done that through a technique it calls complex event processing, or CEP, which uses advanced mathematical algorithms and a special database query language to search for patterns in large, fast-moving data streams. ObjectStore's RFID Accelerator comes with a CEP engine, as well as all the software needed to connect it to an RFID network.
See the forest for the trees
Cambium-Forstbetriebe, a Germany forestry company, used the RFID Accelerator to prevent loss as trees move from the forest to various processing mills.
"Different types of trees bound for different mills are routinely loaded on the same trucks," Palmer explains. "If a tree that should be used to make paper is delivered to a furniture mill, that mill won't pay for it, nor will they return it. It's just considered lost."
To minimize loss, the company now shoots a passive RFID tag into each tree before it leaves the forest. Data from the tag is extracted by a handheld computer, also in the forest, and uploaded to ObjectStore's event-processing engine. Whenever a load of trees arrives at a location within Cambium's supply chain—such as the logistics provider's warehouse or a mill—all tags are read and the data is compared to information in the event-processing engine to ensure that every tree on that load is in the right location. When errors occur, Cambium can take corrective action on its own, rather than relying on the mill operator.
Palmer says ObjectStore also is working with potential customers to discover additional applications for its product.
"Less than 5 percent of companies actually know what they want to monitor with RFID," he says. "In manufacturing, the requirements for putting RFID tags on products are causing a lot of business processes to be changed. As that continues, people will learn more about what data they want to collect and monitor."
Airbus has one successful RFID program in place, involving maintenance tools tracking. Heitman says a number of other applications have been identified, but it will take time to determine which ones will produce business benefits. In the meantime, he says, it makes sense to get suppliers in the loop via the Antenna service.
"RFID is a complex subject," Heitman concludes. "We need to make sure everyone knows what's going in this area."
