From Ford to Fahrvergnügen, RFID Expands the Opportunity to Streamline Production and Lower Manufacturing Costs

In 1885, Karl Benz built the first car run on an internal combustion gasoline engine and began the production of automobiles in 1888.  In 1908, the Model T was introduced by the Ford Motor Company, followed by the introduction of the assembly line method of mass production.  Henry Ford’s commitment to streamlining production and lowering costs continues in the automotive industry today, which has more challenges and complexities than ever before.

With components supplied by more than 4,000 suppliers and complex processes like subassembly procurement and pre-delivery planning, automobile manufacturers are challenged with maintaining a competitive edge.  Manufacturers continuously need to find new ways to improve material flow, optimize planning, and streamline the transport process.  Today, RFID is playing a crucial role in addressing these challenges.

With this week’s 100 Uses of RFID program focusing on the transportation market and having been a Volkswagen owner for many years, I have a personal interest in covering Volkswagen’s use of RFID.  With their dedication to manufacturing quality and the creative ways they differentiate their brand, I’m not at all surprised by Europe's leading vehicle manufacturer’s use of RFID to drive improvements into their supply chain and manufacturing processes.

To improve its material logistics operations and implement an integrated, paperless production and logistics chain, Volkswagen has partnered with IBM.  According to an IBM announcement, VW is driving to become the first vehicle manufacturer to make daily use of RFID in its supply chain and manufacturing processes.  Highlights of VW’s use of RFID include:

• Parts suppliers are applying RFID tags to shipping containers carrying auto parts destined for Volkswagen
• Data from the tagged containers is automatically collected by RFID Readers at key locations throughout the supply chain including supplier shipping areas, various transportation points, parts receiving areas at Volkswagen, during storage, and on the assembly line
• The same RFID system is used to ensure that all empty containers are returned to Volkswagen’s suppliers

Given the size and complexities of the automobile supply chain and manufacturing process, companies like Volkswagen are implementing RFID to automate key areas of their operations.  Do you expect more automakers to implement similar applications to compete with the lemons coming off of the production line?  Let us know your thoughts.

Temperature Tracking in Real-Time for Sensitive Shipments

Admit it. In addition to laughing at the humor of this Nextel commercial, you found interesting how easy it was to know inventory levels, track a shipment and its ETA.  That was a few years ago, and today, people have come quite accustomed to knowing, at any given time, where their package is and when it will get to its destination. And a late delivery is not an option.

But in some industries, speed of delivery isn’t the priority – or at least not the only priority. Temperature is important too. Pharmaceutical companies are painfully aware of the need to track temperature because the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires that they guarantee acceptable temperatures of drugs in transit. Having had to carry Epi-Pen myself, I fully understand that temperatures that are both too high and too low will render them useless. And that’s a scary thought if the only remedy to anaphylactic shock isn’t going to work because of something that is easily within my control. But is it easily within the control of the pharma companies?

They have many, many more potential pitfalls than the customer who needs to be aware of where he’s storing his prescription drugs. They are dealing with transporting drugs through different climates, as well as the complex path of the deliveries which could involve handoffs between transit and temporary storage points. Envision a line that leads from the factory to the product’s ultimate destination. Along this line are supply chain “checkpoints,” where the shipment can either change from road to air, for example, go into storage or go through some other status change. As it moves from one leg of the journey to the next, the environment around the package changes.

Among other shipping companies, DHL has had to figure out how to manage these challenges.  In addition to the FDA mandate, DHL received requests from pharmaceutical customers to offer more options for temperature-controlled logistics. The initial method to meet that need was to use specialized, highly insulated containers that would maintain the desired temperature range. This method proved to be effective, but very costly. It added weight to the shipments and required more packing time making it economically impractical on a large scale.

That’s where RFID came in. As quick background, Deutsche Post World Net (DPWN), the parent company of DHL, formed the Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) Group. Led by its director, Dr. Keith Ulrich, the TIM Group formulated a plan to use RFID technology to track the temperature of shipments at various points from departure to arrival. IBM Global Business Services mapped out the framework which included where and when readings should occur. For RFID expertise, the team engaged the IBM Sensor and Actuator Solutions organization and IBM business partners whose products use RFID technology to track the freshness and temperature integrity of goods.

The RFID system is designed to check and report the temperature of the shipment at every supply chain checkpoint, so DHL knows if there is a problem before the shipment even reaches the airport. That way, DHL can stop the shipment and initiate a new one, minimizing the impact on the customer. In a nut shell, real-time temperature monitoring provides pharmaceutical manufacturers with greater control of their distribution processes. And because it can be delivered at relatively low cost and delivers strong value to the customer, DHL’s first-of-a-kind solution serves as a competitive differentiator.

With this type of solution, I think I’d entrust my Epi-Pens to DHL. How about you?

Providing several real-world examples of RFID-enabled business practices and the power of RFID, sensors and other locationing technologies, Amy Rogers Nazarov has written an article titled "The Internet of Things" for Internet Evolution - a CMP Technology publication and sister site of InformationWeek.  This article describes the many benefits provided by RFID across a variety of applications, along with several realistic challenges and cautions regarding issues such as privacy and data collection. 

ThingMagic is proud to have several customer deployments cited in this article: Tomorrow's Mother (now TM Apparel) is using RFID to improve visibility into its supply chain, Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center has deployed both active and UHF passive RFID for patient and high-value asset tracking, and Ford Motor Company's work with ThingMagic and tool maker DeWALT to develop Tool Link - an RFID-enabled tool tracking solution available to the consumer market today.

A key thread throughout this article is the importance of data sharing and intelligence generation.  Each RFID deployment has its own network requirements and information sharing opportunities, making it critical for users to identify the business process improvements they are targeting.  Managing an inventory of maternity clothing, prepping patients for surgery and locating a missing tool may seem very different on the surface, but applying RFID to each of these activities can result in significant productivity benefits if approached with the right planning and thoughtful decisions on how to best leverage the resulting data.

This article has also been published as a special 16-page handbook insert in the print issue of InformationWeek.  Case studies on the ThingMagic customers referenced in the article are available on our Case Studies web page.

IBM's new Building a Smarter Planet blog has an interesting video describing how interconnected intelligent systems are being used to build a smarter planet.

IBM is defining the smarter planet as "intelligent infrastructure for our energy grids, transportation system, food supply and healthcare networks... It is also about trillions of devices and objects connecting to the Internet and changing the way billions of people live and work.'

The video describes how RFID will be used across the food chain to insure safety and reduce waste and loss.

Today, ThingMagic and several of our business partners are working on making our global food chain more secure, safe and efficient.

One example is the cold chain, where our USB Reader is being used to read temperature sensors made by Infratab Corporation. The combination of Infratab sensors and ThingMagic readers provide producers of perishable foods and products information and insights on the quality of their cold chains.

Infratab is offering a cold chain starter kit – including the ThingMagic USB Reader - now through March.

Ari Juels, Bryan Parno, and I have been working on an approach to solving the key management problem in passive RFID systems. The results of the work are now in peer review, and a preprint is available here.

The key idea (no pun intended!) is to encrypt the tag IDs using a secret key and put shares of the secret key in the RFID tags themselves such that an entity with RF access to a sufficient number of tags (i.e., shares) is able to recover the key and decrypt the tags. An adversary without access to a sufficient number of tags is not able to glean any information about the key or interpret the tag ID (i.e., privacy protection).

This approach works because supply chains possess some interesting properties. First, tags start out in large collections which get smaller over time until there are only a small number on the store shelf and an even smaller number with the consumer. Second, larger collections of tags are usually located in physically secure areas (i.e., backroom of the retail store). Finally, as tags travel through the supply chain, the context they share with each other is lost. An adversary looking some tags on the store shelf does not know anything about their fellow travellers - history is erased. We used these three observations to devise a key management and privacy protection scheme.

More information: Wikipedia entries on Secret Sharing and Reed Solomon Error Correction

RFID Journal article