Table Of ContentGlobalRFID
Edmund W. Schuster
Stuart J. Allen
David L. Brock
Global RFID
The Value of the EPCglobal Network
for Supply Chain Management
With33Figuresand8Tables
123
EdmundW.Schuster
Dr.DavidL.Brock
MIT
77MassachusettsAve.,Rm35-212
Cambridge,MA02139
USA
edmund [email protected]
[email protected]
Dr.StuartJ.Allen
790460thDriveNE
Marysville,WA98270
USA
[email protected]
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ISBN978-3-540-35654-7SpringerBerlinHeidelbergNewYork
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Table of Contents V
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII
Foreword
Who Invented the EPC? by Kevin Ashton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI
A Large-Scale Effort by Sanjay Sarma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XV
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XXIII
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1 The Emergence of a New Key Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 2 Hardware: RFID Tags and Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Chapter 3 Infrastructure: EPCglobal Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Chapter 4 Data: What, When, and Where? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Part II: Leveraging the Supply Chain: Case Studies
Chapter 5 Warehousing: Improving Customer Service . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Chapter 6 Maintenance: Service Parts Inventory Management . . . . . . 59
Chapter 7 Pharmaceuticals: Preventing Counterfeits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Chapter 8 Medical Devices: Smart Healthcare Infrastructure . . . . . . . 109
Chapter 9 Agriculture: Animal Tracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Chapter 10 Food: Dynamic Expiration Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Chapter 11 Retailing: Theft Prevention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Chapter 12 Defense: Improving Security and Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Part III: Creating Business Value
Chapter 13 The Role of Data in Enterprise Resource Planning . . . . . . . 177
Chapter 14 Building a Business Case for the EPCglobal Network . . . . 187
Chapter 15 Enhancing Revenue Using the EPC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Chapter 16 Outlook: Navigating the Sea of Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Glossary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
List of Figures and Tables VII
List of Figures and Tables
Figure 2-1 A Passive RFID Tag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Figure 2-2 A Reader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Table 2-1 Comparison of Different Tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Figure 2-3 Classes of Tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Figure 2-4 The Electronic Product Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Figure 3-1 Technology Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Table 5-1 Cost Savings in Warehousing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Figure 6-1 Business Process for Evaluation and Signing of Service
and Support Contracts with Customers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Figure 6-2 The Service Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Table 6-1 Performance Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Table 7-1 Common Anti-counterfeit Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Figure 7-1 The Pharmaceutical Supply Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Figure 7-2 Data Aggregation in the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain . . 82
Figure 7-3 Databases Within the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain . . . . 85
Figure 7-4 Central Information Repository
for the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Figure 9-1 The Beef Supply Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Figure 10-1 The MRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Figure 10-2 A Temperature Sensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Table 11-1 Characteristics of RFID Technology That Relate to Theft . 141
Figure 11-1 The Three Conceptual Stages of Theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
Figure 11-2 Conceptual Applications Environment – Store . . . . . . . . . 154
Figure 11-3 Conceptual Applications Environment –
Distribution Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Table 12-1 Procurement Classes of Materials and Equipment . . . . . . 166
Table 12–2 Implementation Opportunities for RFID
in the DOD Supply Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Table 13-1 Data and ERP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Figure 13-1 Hierarchy of Production Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
Figure 14-1 Dell’s Supply Chain – Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Figure 14-2 Radio Frequency Identification Scorecard . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
VIII List of Figures and Tables
Figure 14-3 Sample RFID Business Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Figure 15-1 Successful Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Figure 15-2 Unsuccessful Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Figure 15-3 Gathering Data for Spatial Diffusion Analysis . . . . . . . . . 217
Figure 15-4 Mapping Spatial Diffusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Figure 15-5 Aerial Picture of MIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
Figure 15-6 Zip Code Boundaries for Massachusetts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Figure 15-7 Zip Codes Overlaid on Aerial Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
Figure 15-8 Google Two Dimensional Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Figure 15-9 Google Aerial Map of MIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Figure 15-10 Spatial Diffusion, Aerial Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Figure 15-11 Spatial Diffusion, Two Dimensional Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Figure 16-1 The M Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
F
OREWORD
Who Invented the EPC? XI
Who Invented the EPC?
by Kevin Ashton
One of the questions I get asked most often is “Who invented the Electronic
Product Code?” I know I am expected to answer with a single name – some
heroic figure who labored completely alone, perhaps me, perhaps someone
else. But that’s never how invention works, and it’s certainly not true of the
EPC™. Many hundreds if not thousands of people deserve credit.
The EPC system is just a way of using RFID – radio-frequency identifica-
tion. The name RFID dates back to the early 1990s. The technology has
roots in radar-related work done in the 1940s. During these six decades,
hundreds of engineers and scientists, most of them unknown, worked on
RFID. By the time I first saw it in the mid-1990s it was commercially availa-
ble, used for applications like controlling access to office buildings and
automating toll collection. The same is true of Sanjay Sarma, David Brock
and Sunny Siu, the three people with whom I cofounded MIT’s Auto-ID
Center. If any of us “discovered” RFID, it was only by looking in our pock-
ets or at the windshields of our cars.
The big challenge in the mid-1990s was to make RFID cheap and standard
enough that it could be used everywhere, and to find the killer applications
that would make ubiquity useful – to build a mass market for what, until
then, was a niche technology.
David Brock, a research scientist in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab,
wanted to use RFID to help robots interact with the world around them. He
saw that combining the automatic identification capability of RFID with the
limitless information access of the Internet could be a powerful, practical
way to do this. Sanjay Sarma, a rising Professor in MIT’s Mechanical Engi-
neering department, championed Brock’s idea and helped develop it.
Sarma also reached out to his faculty colleague Sunny Siu for additional
expertise on the networking challenges.
XII Foreword
At the same time, I was a junior Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble wor-
ried about a much more mundane problem: how to keep my products on
the shelf. Embedding RFID tags in the products, and RFID readers in the
shelf, seemed like the perfect – indeed the only – way to do this. But I
needed RFID to be cheaper, better, and standardized in an open system. In
early 1999, by sheer chance, I met Brock and Sarma. The result was a potent
meeting of minds. I was looking to fund research, and Brock, Sarma and
Siu were looking for research funding.
Working with Alan Haberman of the Uniform Code Council, one of the
founding fathers of the UPC bar code, and Allan Boath of the Gillette Com-
pany, we developed a plan for a new industry funded research consortium
at MIT. Haberman wanted to call it the Center For Automatic Identification
And Data Capture. At the last minute I persuaded him to abbreviate it to
the Auto-ID Center. But my luck with names is hit and miss: inspired by
the bar code, I had the bad idea of calling Auto-ID Center’s technology
UPC2. Brock and Sarma saved the day – one of them, I cannot remember
which, proposed a far better alternative: EPC, for electronic product code.
The Auto-ID Center opened on October 1, 1999. P&G loaned me to MIT to
act as Executive Director, and Sunny Siu was the first Research Director.
When Sunny left MIT in 2000, Sanjay Sarma, always the guiding light
behind the research, took on his role.
The four-year project was more challenging and ultimately more fruitful
than any of us expected. The Center grew from its founding three sponsors,
P&G, Gillette and the UCC, to 103 companies. It expanded globally, fund-
ing additional research labs in Japan, Australia, China, Switzerland and the
United Kingdom. Working closely with industry, it published hundreds of
research papers by hundreds of researchers, and solved many of the prob-
lems standing in the way of low cost, high performance, ubiquitous RFID.
In 2003 the Center’s sponsors were ready to use the EPC. MIT licensed the
technology to the UCC, which established a new subsidiary, called EPC
Global, to operate the EPC system all over the world. The labs were
renamed Auto-ID Labs and funded by EPC Global to continue advanced
research related to the EPC System.
Who invented the EPC? It’s the wrong question. Invention is not an activity
of individuals. It is the output of many people, spread around the world
Who Invented the EPC? XIII
and across decades, working hard to improve things, sometimes alone, but
more often in teams and frequently unaware of one another. The heroic
individual inventor is a myth created after the fact – an unfortunate side
effect of success. When something succeeds, as the EPC indisputably has,
people want to know ‘who invented it?’ as if they urgently needed to carve
a statue. But no one invented the EPC system. It was and still is the art of
many – a brilliant, vibrant society of disparate minds and voices, all work-
ing passionately to make something new and important. That may be a
more complicated answer, but it is also more uplifting. One of the greatest
lessons of the EPC, and of all other technologies if their stories were truly
told, is that invention is not a lonely act: it means bridging oceans, gener-
ations, and cultures to build a community of creativity.
Kevin Ashton, cofounder and former executive director, MIT Auto-ID Center
