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RFID tags becoming easier to read

On the other hand, return on investment for packagers will remain invisible for the near term. Now Wal-Mart softens stance on deadlines.

Packagers scrambling to understand the implementation pitfalls of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags had all sorts of stories to tell at RFID2004 Conference in Washington, DC, on June 10. When his turn at the lectern came, Howard Stockdale, the data processing director at Beaver Street Fisheries, Jacksonville, FL, drew many laughs when he explained his mystification when the exact same RFID tags scanned better on boxes of snapper than they did on boxes of grouper. He hypothesized that grouper retains more moisture than snapper.

Simon Langford, seated next to Stockdale on the dais in the Reagan International Trade Center, guffawed as hard as anyone. Langford is director of Global RFID at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Bentonville, AR, the U.S. retail colossus that has almost single-handedly forced U.S. packaged-goods manufacturers to undergo a crash course in RFID technology and implementation.

Wal-Mart has asked its top 100 suppliers to have RFID tags on all product cases shipped into Texas as of January 2005.

Wal-Mart understands

But Langford, in a British accent which hasn’t been eroded by five years in Arkansas, was very eager to get the word out that Wal-Mart understands the problems faced by Beaver Street Fisheries and others, and is willing to ease its requirement when conditions permit.

He complained that the media had misinterpreted Wal-Mart’s original intentions and has taken signs of recent accommodations as an indication that Wal-Mart is “backing off” its schedule.

“We never said all cases and pallets coming into Texas,” Langford emphasized. “We asked our suppliers ‘What is viable for you?’” For some suppliers—a company that is instituting a new warehouse management system, for example—it won’t make sense for them to go live on January 1, 2005, Langford said.

“We are all about collaboration,” was the cooperative theme he kept hammering on like a carpenter.

Nonetheless, Langford disclosed that he would be meeting with Wal-Mart’s next 200 largest suppliers the following week to brief them on an implementation schedule for them, which he declined to disclose. He emphasized, however, “We will expand to additional suppliers in 2005 and 2006.”

Langford and Stockdale were joined on the dais by Greg Edds, product manager for global supply chain operations at Hewlett-Packard Corp., Palo Alto, CA, and Mike O’Shea, director of corporate auto ID/RFID strategy at Kimberly-Clark Corp., Dallas, TX. Both companies were among the 100 suppliers identified by Wal-Mart to be subject to the January 2005 Texas deadline.

But Stockdale of Beaver Street Fisheries said that he had asked to be one of the 33 “volunteer companies” who had opted into the group because of the opportunities his company sees as inherent in RFID tags. “We see the global supply chain changing at an unprecedented rate,” said the RFID implementation manager of the $500 million per year company, which also markets meat.

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