Manufacturing Business Technology

• Tag analytics provider reports "read milestone"
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 9, 2007
  RFID analytics and applications supplier T3Ci recently reported its billionth RFID tag read.
  
• RFID Tribe launches professionals registry
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 9, 2007
  The RFID Tribe association Web site offers a rapidly growing and interactive forum.
  
• Attention shoppers: Expedited checkout is on the way
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 9, 2007
  The project will investigate the unique RFID challenges associated with shoes and clothing, and explore "cash register-less" checkout.
  
• Industry expert offers retrospective on RFID
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 9, 2007
  Lack of collaborative process change and effective measurement of ROI has had a dilatory effect on adoption, according toAMR Research in a three-year review of the technology.
  
• Vue queues up mobile RFID platform
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 9, 2007
  By eliminating the need for fixed infrastructure and network connectivity, mobile workforces can be truly RFID.
  
• Pharma firms tap RF-enabled logistics services for sensitive products shipping
  
  Carolyn Heinze, Contributing Editor, August 6, 2007
    When it comes to complying with government regulations, pharmaceutical manufacturers have special needs. Requirements surrounding the tracking and monitoring of temperature sensitive products—such as such as vaccines, cultures, and tissue samples used in clinical trials—during shipping are a prime example.
  
• EPCglobal ratifies product code standard
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 6, 2007
  The  Electronic Product Code Information Services standard that focuses on secure, real-time exchange of RFID data between trading partners.
  
• European Union to temper RFID regulation
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 6, 2007
  Current concerns regarding RFID—particularly the security of personal information—are best addressed by existing European law and public education.
  
• RFID players Impinj, Alien Technology, and AeroScout nab capital funding
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 6, 2007
  Though RFID still remains a fragmented, competitive market, investments are going to innovative companies that continue to find success and win customer contracts.
  
• Device maker ADASA wins technology excellence award
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 6, 2007

  ADASA

  received the Excellence in RFID Technology award delivered for theindustry’s first truly portable RFID tag encoding device, enables strategically targeted tagging with the lowest total cost of ownership.
  
• NIST offers RFID adoption guidelines
  
  By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff, August 6, 2007
  Security guidelines and best practices for RFID adoption have been issued in response to meeting Congressional mandates requiring NIST to assist federal agencies in adequately securing IT systems.
  
• Back-office IT and business process outsourcing seen as another means to cost containment
  
  By Jim Fulcher, contributing editor, August 1, 2007
  Contract manufacturing and logistics outsourcing are common to the automotive, high-tech, and manufacturing industries. These types of organizations also are long-time users of outsourced call center and CRM services. What's new is a concentrated effort to outsource back-office support operations—e.
  
• Next up for SAP ES Community: supply chain execution, value-added network solutions
  
  By Jim Fulcher, contributing editor, August 1, 2007
  New players in SAP's Enterprise Services Community include tried-and-true vendors of supply chain execution (SCE) and reverse logistics solutions; as well as providers of network services that automate supply chain communications. Members of the community are committed to a common business language that enables software applications and infrastructure products running on disparate systems to co...
  
• Smithfield Foods, Perdue Farms see plant capacity gains from forecasting and BI tools
  
  By Staff, August 1, 2007
  A lot more goes into putting that hot dog in your hand at the baseball stadium than simply the aisle barker signaling, “Hot dogs here.” Especially if it's one from Smithfield Packing, a division of Smithfield, Va.-based parent company Smithfield Foods. “It all starts with a forecast,” says Stuart Yowell, demand planning director.
  
• Online solution unites buyers, suppliers in sourcing marketplace
  
  By Staff, August 1, 2007
  Sourcing quality parts from local shops was once a difficult endeavor for Electromechanica, a Boston-based electromechanical engineering service. The company could not find the custom parts it needed for a fair price in the New England area, so it turned to MFG.com at a colleague's recommendation. “Once we found our first part on MFG.
  
• Centric offers off-the-shelf support for new product sourcing
  
  By Staff, August 1, 2007
  As more manufacturers, distributors, and even retailers try sourcing new products directly from low-cost country suppliers, the unique challenges of the task are more widely apparent. For one, new product sourcing isn't well suited to the robust capabilities of design engineering-oriented product life-cycle management (PLM) tools, nor the limited functionality of procurement applications.
  
• FullTilt suite makes fast work of product information management
  
  By Staff, August 1, 2007
  When Milwaukee-based badge and label manufacturer Brady Corp. decided to build an online store, it hit a problem: Using Excel spreadsheets to manage the information for tens of thousands of products was error-prone and inefficient. In particular, there was no way to make “global” data changes, which forced staff to manually update the same details on a given product in multiple loca...
  
• Major players propose human workflow extensions to business processes spec
  
  By Staff, August 1, 2007
  Enterprise software heavyweights—namely IBM, BEA, Oracle, SAP, and Adobe—are submitting a new proposal to extend the BPEL Web services business process orchestration specification to include human workflows. The proposals, to be submitted to the Web services standards body OASIS, will include an extension of the BPEL spec—named BPEL4People—which specifies the inclusion o...
  
• Transpara uses Microsoft Excel to put KPIs in the palm of your hand
  
  By Staff, August 1, 2007
  Plenty of vendors talk about getting the right information to the right people at the right time, but few actually deliver in a cost-effective or timely manner. One of the few is Transpara, a small vendor with eight employees that supplies operations intelligence software to the process and utility industries.
  
• Composite applications framework links ERP and manufacturing operations
  
  By Jim Fulcher, contributing editor, August 1, 2007
  While manufacturing execution systems (MES) now comprise a $1-billion market, the solutions don't always fit today's requirements, says Simon Jacobson, an analyst with Boston-based AMR Research. At least not yet. “The market is growing, but no one has emerged as a leader,” Jacobson says.