Platform for Growth

With sales continuing to grow in new and existing markets, Daisy Brand's sour cream is now shipped to third-party warehouses and sold in about 70 percent of all grocery stores in the United States, as well as in stores across Europe and Mexico. The company, which was quick to embrace the Microsoft .NET explosion, was also eager to tackle RFID and volunteered to meet Wal-Mart's RFID mandate by January 2005.

But as a mid-market supplier, Daisy Brand realized that gaining operational efficiencies to offset the cost of an RFID deployment was just as important as satisfying the compliance mandates from its best customers. After meeting Wal-Mart's mandate in November 2004, Daisy Brand turned its focus toward leveraging the power RFID to gain visibility into its inventory.

"Daisy Brand runs an efficient warehouse operation and we are always looking for ways to provide continuous improvement without increasing manufacturing cost," says Kevin Brown, director of information systems at Daisy Brand.  "For this project, we wanted to take advantage of what we learned from our compliance experience and extend it to other areas of operations."

Laying the Foundation
Daisy Brand's IS team looked for a flexible RFID solution that could easily be reconfigured for future applications. After extensive evaluations, Daisy Brand selected GlobeRanger's iMotion Edgeware platform as the foundation for developing RFID solutions for its warehouse. The solution -- also based on the Microsoft .NET platform -- easily integrated with Daisy Brand's home-grown warehouse management system and its SSA Global Protean ERP system. The fact that GlobeRanger's headquarters were located six miles down the road from Daisy Brand's warehouse was an added bonus.

"GlobeRanger's iMotion platform gave us the flexible foundation that we needed to evolve our solutions," says Brown.
At the start of the project, Daisy Brand's IS team participated in GlobeRanger's three-day training program to learn iMotion's features/functionality and to develop solutions using iMotion's software development kit. The team learned to leverage iMotion in:

- Setting up an RFID device network.
- Configuring the device network to capture the appropriate RFID data.
- Designing a data flow that supports a specific business process.
- Testing the solution in an emulated environment.

In addition to the standard training program, the team spent an extra day working with GlobeRanger's development team in an interactive session to design new RFID-enabled processes and solution components for higher risk and more complex portions of the project.

How it Works
On May 1, 2006, Daisy Brand launched the latest layer of its RFID project using the iMotion platform, which would track finished goods inventory to the staging area, and then to a truck for delivery. All forklifts and dock doors are enabled with RFID antennas, so all movement in the plant will be automatically recorded.
"Instead of waiting for large batch entries to occur during the day or the next day regarding inventory movement, the data is actually being integrated into our ERP system in real time as the forklifts are driving around the warehouse," explains Brown.

Here's how the new system works: The GlobeRanger iMotion platform integrates the company's warehouse management system with Alien Technology's readers installed at both dock doors and on forklifts as well as with the RFID label printer-encoder and bar code scanners. Each case of Daisy Brand sour cream is marked with a barcode that identifies the product's stock keeping unit (SKU). When a scanner reads the barcodes on each case, the SKU is communicated to an RFID printer/encoder, which, in turn, writes the data onto an Alien ALL-9460 "Omni-Squiggle" Electronic Product Code (EPC) Class 1, Gen 2 RFID label.

After the pallet is cased in plastic wrap, the RFID label is attached to the pallet and all bar code and EPC data is stored in a database. When a forklift driver moves a pallet, Alien readers capture and display the corresponding EPC on the screen of the vehicle's tablet personal computer so that the forklift operator can add or adjust the data, such as where the pallet is being moved and why.

Mining the Benefits
Daisy Brand expects its new RFID solution to improve the accuracy of fulfilling orders and increase efficiency in tracking finished goods, while improving the productivity of forklift drivers.

"It gives the entire organization visibility into the state of finished goods. It also gives us the chance to turn inventory for our customers more frequently and get fresher product on the shelves," says Brown. "Having the visibility into our current state of inventory allows us to take cost out of the system. It's a great puzzle, and every time you solve a piece of the puzzle, you find another business opportunity to pursue."

[RFID Insights]
RFID and the Barcode: Partners, Not Rivals How to leverage the power of both technologies to better manage supply chain data 4By Joe White, VP of Product Management and Tag Engineering, Symbol Technologies' RFID Division If you Google the phrase "RFID and barcode", the articles you're likely to find fall into one of two categories. One is likely to be advice about navigating the "transition" from old printed labels to the new RFID tags. The other may arrive under a headline such as "How RFID and bar codes can work together", but when you read it, all you get is a laundry list of the reasons why RFID is better.

A good part of this belief is grounded in solid fact; RFID can in fact do things that the barcode simply cannot. However, there is little likelihood that RFID will replace barcodes anytime soon. RFID and barcode technologies really are going to co-exist into the foreseeable future, with interlocking roles in the very same supply chains. Each has qualities that make it the best answer to one step or another in the process.

Different steps in the retail supply chain put different demands on a data system. RFID works well in environments where human intervention can be eliminated, such as shipping, distribution and retail site receiving. In contrast, barcodes are sufficient in piece-by-piece operations that require humans, such as point-of-sale checkout and product returns or warranty service. And most products in a typical retail chain will pass through both environments during their lifecycles.

Does the possibility exist for an all-RFID world with no barcode? The answer is very likely, someday. However, it will take several years to transition technologies. If I walk into a supermarket 10 years from now and pick up a can of peas, it will likely have a barcode. But in a distribution center, every case of peas will soon have both an RFID tag and a barcode. People who put both of these technologies to work side by side will reap benefits for many years to come. To read this article in its entirety, visit www.consumergoods.com.