Articles
Patties EPC trial results to be released at Impetus (March 2006)
Radio frequency identification (RFID) and the Electronic Product Code (EPC) that governs its use in the supply chain is still very new, but international experience, and now local trials will help ready GS1 Australia and its alliance partner community for its widespread EPC implementation.
The most high profile of the local trials scheduled by the GS1 Professional Services team is between food manufacturer Patties Foods and Montague Cold Storage with input and support from GS1Alliance Partners, VeriSign and Matthews Intelligent Identification who are each supplying and installing the required elements of RFID / EPC hardware and software.
Under the trial, believed to be the first ever to take place in freezers, second generation EPC tags are used to track the movement of pallets from Patties production facilities and into Montague's warehouse. The trial is also one of the first to use all the elements of the EPC network to enable sharing of data between all business partners using the EPCglobal standards.
GS1 Professional Services' Senior Advisor, John Szabo said the trial would be implemented over a month during March and the results presented at GS1 Australia's annual conference, Impetus 2006, in July. With other pilots already in the pipeline, he said GS1 Professional Services was preparing themselves to assist GS1 Australia members with RFID / EPC projects.
"Since it first came to prominence just a couple of years ago, the EPC standards for RFID have moved swiftly from small scale trials into broad scale implementation overseas," John said. "GS1's Professional Services team are excited to be working with our members and partners to gain valuable EPC implementation experience, and we fully expect more implementations to follow here very soon."
Mark Dingley, Identification Systems manager at Matthews, says its main aim is to determine the reliability and integration ease of RFID Class 1 Gen 2 technology into a production environment, in a true business-to- business setting.
Dingley says, "Matthews has made a significant investment in this pilot with the hardware and software we've supplied. We really believe in the benefits of RFID, and, as with the other partners, deem this pilot an excellent beginning."
Joe Rettino, Patties Foods General Manager (Purchasing and Supply) says RFID is the next natural step in improving the company's inventory control, having spent previous years improving its bar coding and eMessaging systems.
"Even though bar coding technology gives us transparency of our inventory, RFID goes one step further in achieving better visibility of products," he said.
The tracking of pallets between Patties and Montagues will be achieved by interfacing the Matthews RFID equipment installed at Patties and Montague back to the VeriSign-managed EPC-IS system. Information is uploaded to the EPC-IS when a pallet is labelled, goes into the Freezer storeroom, is dispatched from Patties and arrives at Montague.
