CPG makers analyze RFID data for supply chain information
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
Use of RFID technology to label and track inbound and outbound shipments is said to be the coming thing. But what's less a foregone conclusion—given the complexities of RFID, and the sheer volume of data—is how manufacturers would use RFID to glean information such as retailers' sales of items.
Many of the world's largest retail suppliers have complied with mandates to ship pallets and cases with RFID tags—but with little in return for making the costly investments needed, says Dr. Jonathan Golovin, CEO and cofounder of RFID analytics and applications provider T3Ci.
That doesn't need to be the case. Procter & Gamble, Gillette, Unilever, and Hewlett-Packard use T3Ci software and subscription services to analyze electronic product code (EPC) data gathered from RFID systems to better understand supply chain performance.
"We've been working with T3Ci on EPC analytics for the past year and have decided to expand our partnership to collaboratively identify and build high-value applications," says Steve Rehling, director of IT and head of RFID systems at consumer packaged goods manufacturer Procter & Gamble. "T3Ci demonstrates a clear understanding of how to eventually get value from EPC data across the supply chain."
T3Ci's proprietary set of classification and analysis methods and reports are used to debug and analyze live RFID data. The approach centers around the company's historian—an RFID system of record configured with a detailed model of the supply chain. One core historian function is to collect disjointed fragments of information about product movements, interpret these movements in supply chain-model context, and update the model to reflect the current status and history of each tracked product.
Data analysis experts at T3Ci then generate weekly supplier reports and discuss the findings with the manufacturer. Consequently, suppliers are able to get better information about cycle times, dwell times, and inventory levels—along with information about retail-store behavior and store-to-store variation.
"Manufacturers understand that use of RFID technology can prevent out-of-stock situations at retailers by offering necessary visibility to execution—that's the Holy Grail," says Peter Reiman, an executive VP, T3Ci. "The problem is that to maintain an item-level history at a serial-number level, data from RFID reads requires significant interpretation and processing."
