Alien Technology announced in late January that Kimberly-Clark Corp. has selected the Alien® ALR-9800 Enterprise RFID Reader as part of its logistics program to meet retail industry mandates requiring the use of RFID. K-C chose the multiprotocol Alien ALR-9800 after conducting an extensive evaluation of EPC Class 1 Gen 2 RFID readers at the company’s EPCglobal-accredited RFID research lab. It is the first end-user test lab to be certified by standards-body EPCglobal Inc. for testing RFID technology in supply chains.
“As we continue to move toward fully implementing RFID technology throughout our supply chain operations, it is mission-critical that we have the right RFID hardware equipment in place to meet our needs,” says Mike O’Shea, Director, Auto-ID Sensing Technologies of Kimberly-Clark. “We chose the Alien ALR-9800 for its exceptional read performance and scalability, easy-to-manage data collection, and its potential for low total cost-of-ownership.”
Reader locations
K-C will deploy Alien ALR-9800 Readers initially in key manufacturing and transport locations across North America. The ALR-9800’s will be located on conveyors and stretch-wrappers to automatically capture data from RFID-tagged packaged products, cartons and pallets, thus providing up-to-the-second information on the movement of products through the supply chain that can be leveraged by the company and its retail customers.
Introduced in August 2005 and certified Gen 2-compliant in September 2005, the Alien ALR-9800 is the first RFID reader based on the Alien Enterprise RFID Platform, and designed specifically for compliance with the EPC Class 1 Gen 2 specification. The ALR-9800 offers enterprise-scalable architecture, enhanced read capability across EPC multiple protocols, and dense reader management.
