Long Range, Accurate RTLS with Zebra’s WhereNET Solutions
Tracking and managing valuable assets is major concern for many industries especially in manufacturing and warehouse environments. Whether you’re tracking a work-in-process or general inventory and assets, the greater accuracy and closer to real-time visibility you can achieve is directly connected to business success.
RFID-based systems provide an immediate and non-line of sight means to capture your inventory or asset collection. However, the most common passive RFID tags and readers have a limited range and still require a user to scan the tags or pass them through a fixed reader portal. This is where Zebra’s WhereNET active RFID solutions can provide the range that can be used over your entire facility, yielding maximum coverage. With maximum coverage you will have real-time visibility into your entire business and operations, providing you with actionable data in order to make smarter decisions.
Plant Access Grows Its Competitive Edge with Honeywell RFID Solutions
Plant Access is a specialised logistics services provider, catering for the green life industry. Plant Access provides a highly efficient service utilising a unique, innovative steel stillage design used to pick, crossdock and deliver nursery plants to Bunnings Warehouse locations across Victoria and South Australia.
Weeding out manual processes
Plant Access manages the orders and provides the steel stillages that are used to transport plant products from over 67 nursery supplier sites to Bunnings stores across Victoria and South Australia. Shipments from different suppliers are consolidated at the Plant Access cross dock facility before orders are transported to Bunnings locations and plants are sold to consumers direct out of the steel stillages.
At any one time, Plant Access has thousands of re-usable steel stillages spread across hundreds of sites throughout the supply chain. Knowing the location of all these stillages and the status of an order was a serious challenge for Plant Access under a legacy paper-based manual ordering system.
A new automated tracking system was necessary to capture real-time data from nursery supplier sites, the Plant Access cross dock logistics facility and the Bunnings stores, in order for Plant Access to have an accurate and instant visibility of their stillage assets and the products they were transporting.
Gain Control Over your Assets with RFID Asset – Modern Software for Growing Businesses
One of the complex challenges small and medium sized organizations face is efficiently keeping track of critical assets as their organizations scale. Without a reliable automated asset management system, there is a sharp increase in redundancies, expenditures, and labor.
Imagine locating many diverse assets in a room in a matter of seconds, rather than hours. Because RFID technology reads multiple tags at once without requiring a line of sight, customers are able to more quickly and accurately locate and track assets without the physical challenges of scanning bar codes and manual methods.
RFID Asset maximizes Radio Frequency Identification technology to automate asset tracking and management in a wide variety of environments and situations. The software supports passive RFID tags, barcodes, fixed readers like the Zebra FX7500 and mobile handheld readers like Zebra’s MC3190-Z and MC9190-Z.
Transforming the Customer Experience with RFID
Despite the explosion of online choices, customers still value seeing and touching merchandise firsthand – an experience only available to them in a brick-and-mortar store. When retailers add the cutting-edge benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to that unique advantage, they help close the all-to-common gaps in service, information and inventory of traditional retail and open more opportunities for sales and customer satisfaction.
RFID empowers retailers like never before, elevating shopping into an enriching and positive experience. With RFID as part of a total solution, retailers can greet customers by name, impress them with a wider selection of merchandise, and better serve them with faster assistance, deeper product information and more personalized promotions. What’s more, retailers can turn shopping time into social time with RFID enabled kiosks that enable customers to interact with their social network of family and friends. And when customers are ready to buy, so are retailers. RFID applications can identify merchandise, recognize loyalty accounts and facilitate mobile transactions. Even fulfilling customers’ needs is easier using RFID. Retailers gain real-time visibility into inventory, so they can expedite fulfillment of orders from closer locations. In short, RFID – along with advanced retail technology – can help keep customers happy and coming back in this intensely competitive industry.
The Internet of Things with Zebra and Barcodes, Inc.
What is it?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the coming connectivity of everything you own, everything you see. No longer will access to the internet be limited to single point interfaces like your phone or computer, or single-point data sources like web pages or servers. Nor will it be limited to you! Everything you see can, and someday will, be interconnected and sharing data: your tv, your refrigerator, your home, your car, the roads you drive on, the building you work in, the package you’re delivering… everything.
So far, the Internet of Things has been most closely associated with machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in manufacturing and power, oil and gas utilities. Products built with M2M communication capabilities are often referred to as being smart.
Why do I care?
IoT will affect the way we live and work. IoT will impact every industry out there: Healthcare, Manufacturing, Transportation & Logisitics, Retail, Hospitality, Warehousing, and so on. Your competitors will be embracing IoT capabilities to find a competitive advantage, the same advantage you want to get first. The advantage that comes with speed, efficiency, and a clear view of your assets and operations, your people and inventory, 24/7 in real time.
Infographic: Barcodes vs RFID
When it comes down to choosing the right technology for tracking anything from products in a warehouse to people at an event, the 2 main options today are Barcodes or RFID. Most people are familiar with barcodes and RFID is becoming more and more common place but the differences between them may not be so clear. The first big difference you’ll find is the cost between RFID and barcodes.
This infographic is a great primer on the capabilities of each technology to help you decide if the the cost difference is worth it for your application. As always, feel free to contact one of our data collection specialists to get the perfect solution for your needs.
RFID for your Cat
When you think about RFID one of your first thoughts probably isn’t how it can benefit your pet cat. Many pets today have an RFID chip in them for identification purposes but beyond that, the technology doesn’t really come into play in their day to day lives.
Ben Milliam realized that he could enhance his cat’s general curiosity and ‘mobile’ hunting drive with the aid of some RFID tagged wiffle balls and a modified electronic feeder he embedded an RFID reader in. Now his cat, Monkey, gets a taste of being an outdoor ‘hunting’ cat in the comforts of home.
You can find a detailed breakdown of Ben’s process and how be built everything on his site.
Impinj’s Octane 5.4 Update for Fixed RFID Readers
Impinj has announced the availability of the new Octane 5.4, firmware that enables Speedway, xArray, and xPortal readers to access LLRP data from RAIN RFID tags. Octane 5.4 firmware is now available for Impinj authorized partners and our customers that have Enhanced Maintenance. All other users should contact the company their reader was purchased from to request firmware updates. In this update, several new features were added to the firmware based on customer feedback. Also based on feedback, Impinj graduated the Octane Java SDK from beta status.
Updates in Octane 5.4 include:
- Expanded RAIN RFID tag tracking functionality with Impinj xArray tag direction mode.
- Get entry, update, and exit reports for tags as they move through designated sectors via Octane Java SDK 1.2
- Enhanced security profiles to protect your reader.
- Require readers to authenticate to gain network access using standards based 802.1x.
- Leverage SFTP to protect upgrades by authenticating to a remote server and ensuring secure transport of files.
- Encrypt Customer Application Partition (CAP) files to secure embedded applications.
For assistance updating to Octane 5.4 or finding the right Impinj RFID reader, contact one of our RFID specialists at Barcodes, Inc.
RFID vs Barcodes
With the introduction of NFC, RFID has become a trendy technology, but is it really a necessity for your business? Let’s go over some of the differences between barcodes and RFID:
- Line of Sight – Rather than using light to collect or read a number from a barcode, radio waves are used to read a number from the RFID tag. Therefore, RFID does not require a line of sight to operate, but rather you can wave the RFID reader to read the tags.
- Multiple Item Scanning – Since RFID does not require line of sight it is not necessary to present each tag to the reader separately (as is required for barcodes); instead, all tags within the range of the reader can be read almost simultaneously as they pass the reader.
- Automation & Accuracy – Barcodes require a person to manually read each individual barcode, which can lead to manual read errors and mis-scanning. RFID, on the other hand, is a fully automated solution with a higher accuracy rate.
Although there is a huge savings in RFID technology from a resource, time and accuracy standpoint, we rarely recommend a business migrating from a completely manual process to a RFID solution. Companies that currently incorporate barcodes face the best return on investment from a RFID solution. Talk to one of our experts today to get a full assessment of your business.
CipherLab’s New Long Range 1862 UHF RFID Handheld Reader
CipherLab has recently announced that its 1862 UHF RFID handheld reader is now launching.
The CipherLab 1862 UHF RFID handheld reader has a long reading range of 16.5 ft. which makes data collection easier from the ground. Users can also easily reach and collect data from hard to reach locations. On top of that, the data collection process is made simple with the ability to read manifold and various EPC Gen 2 (ISO 18000-6C) tags at one shot. CipherLab’s 1860 series’ high performance RFID technology makes applications such as asset management and item level tagging quick and easy.
