Narrator:

Welcome to the supply chain visibility stories, the podcast for supply chain managers, brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider. Supply Chain Visibility Stories is hosted by Bill Wohl, a technology industry veteran and enterprise software professional.

Bill Wohl:

Thanks everyone for joining us. Today marks the next in a series of discussions exploring the intersection of technology and business. We try to design these discussions to be brief and focused and we're hoping this podcast format inspires you, our audience, to think about how technology impacts your organization and to engage with us as the series continues. I'll have information about how to do that at the end of today's discussion. I'm Bill Wohl and I'm honored to be the host of this series brought to you by ACSIS. I'm always fascinated by the business challenges faced by companies and how those challenges can be addressed by technology. When we started this series, we talked about the increasing interest again in supply chains. A lot of that driven by the macro trends that companies are facing today, including the ongoing impact of the pandemic. During the course of our podcast, one of the recurring themes has been capturing data and capturing data in the gaps along the supply chain. Now, it would be hard to be in the supply chain world without having heard of Zebra Technologies. They're the leading mobile computing company that makes the technology that is used to sense, analyze, and act on supply chains in real time. They manufacture and sell marking, tracking, and computer printing technologies. And there's probably not a listener out there whose work is not somehow scanned or measured in some way by a Zebra device. Today's guest sits square in the middle of this area of interest on RFID. So, please welcome back to our program, David Perrine from ACSIS. And please also welcome from Zebra Technologies channel account manager Tom Kilianski. Welcome to the program, Tom.

Tom Kilianski:

Thank you. Glad to be here.  

Bill Wohl:

David, as we kick off the program,  let's get grounded first as we think about the history of supply chain, we really start to think about capturing data along the supply chain and the topic of of RFID always comes up as you think way back to the beginning of RFID. What stands out for you as sort of the early lessons learned?

David Perrine:

Bill, great question. First, I want to again welcome Tom on behalf of ACSIS and the participation today is really appreciated. Going back into the 80s, RFID was a highly technical and expensive play to identify things from rail cars to tractors and trailers and to what is now the ubiquitous easy pass that you use on your cars on toll roads. Moving forward, industry adoption of this was was pretty slow quite frankly into the 80s and 90s. It was very difficult to get interest on this from from industry. But beginning in early 2000, and I'd like to consider early 2000 and 2002, 2005 as the past RFID,  we begin to see interest in this in the areas of consumer products in the form of Walmart and what is now known as the electronic product code or the EPC initiative. A few years later, 2004, RFID became interesting to the pharmaceutical industry for the serialization and tracking of their products, medical devices and pharmaceutical products around the world. But again, commercial industry was slow to adopt. Where we have seen the adoption over the past is in apparel. And many of us are RFID users when we go buy a piece of clothing at the local mall, not realizing that the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode tag actually has an RFID tag embedded in the back of it. What our goal today is is to explain to the listeners how the RFID of today which Tom will speak to is readily available my term maybe no one else's it's not a science project it is it is becoming as ubiquitous in some ways as the barcode and what we want to cover today is how the listener who's perhaps in a industrial setting a commercial setting can make use of this technology to their advantage to help automate and provide visibility at the end of the supply chain.

Bill Wohl:

David, thanks for kicking us off. Tom, again, welcome to the program. Let's start with the work that you do for Zebra. Tell us a little bit about your role at the company.

Tom Kilianski:

Yeah, so I function as a channel account manager and what I do is promote and support the sale of our RFID and real-time location solutions technologies through our reseller partners. And for those folks who aren't aware of Zebra's go-to-market strategy, we are heavily reliant on our reseller partners to move Zebra product and services.

Bill Wohl:

Great. Well, it's great to have you here. David started a little bit with a history lesson. , you know, if I think back to some of the early projects I was involved in during those days, a lot of what we were hearing about RFID, there were, you know, certainly there were lessons learned, but there were some horror stories about the cost per device, the challenges of powering them, their reliability, but the game has changed considerably since then. What's the state of RFID today?

Tom Kilianski:

So you're right, Bill. I mean, there have been tremendous advances in the technology and more specifically in the cost of implementing that technology that make it much more effective from an ROI standpoint than it was previously.

Bill Wohl:

Continuing on that theme, I I recall that at its beginnings, RFID seemed to have the right best business case for high-value items, keeping track of automobiles in large light lots or rail cars. But RFID technology is really ubiquitous today. We think about supply chains and the movements of tens if not hundreds of millions of goods. And now the technology has moved to the point where RFID  as an approach for capturing data is much more common and the ROI calculations are completely different. Right?

Tom Kilianski:

That's correct. Absolutely. And part of the primary driver around the ROI calculation is a reduction in the cost of a RFID tag, generally less than five cents per tag these days.

Bill Wohl:

Okay. So, if we for the audience, if we ground the audience a little bit, everybody knows about barcode scanning, and I'm sure people understand the concept of RFID tagging. The real difference here is the ability of RFID tags to not require a worker to scan or capture the data. Barcode requires something to look and see the package as opposed to RFID sort of in the background but functioning. Is that a simple way to think about it?

Tom Kilianski:

Yeah, absolutely. I think RFID is just another form of automatic identification and data capture. , you can do that in a traditional way using a barcode and a scanner pointed at a barcode on a label or you can do it automatically using RFID with an embedded  RFID tag.

Bill Wohl:

So, we all like to think Tom about the real world applications of the technology. I had that experience yesterday. I was sitting on an airplane. I was watching the baggage handlers load the plane underneath me and there were two guys throwing bags on and a nice young woman pointing what looked like a zebra scanner capturing barcodes. But it struck me at that moment that an RFID tag would essentially eliminate the need for someone to manually point a scanner and capture that baggage data in real time. Is that an appropriate way to think about the use case of RFID over scanning?

Tom Kilianski:

Yeah, absolutely, Bill. In fact, that's a real world for RFID which is taking place today. In terms of baggage handling for airlines.

Bill Wohl:

We thought early in the days of RFID about it being really used from a business case perspective for finished goods, but increasingly I understand that RFID is really actually also quite useful for goods in progress, tracking stuff as they move through the supply chain. Is that the right way to think about it?

Tom Kilianski:

Yeah, I think there are a couple categories there. So, you know, tracking goods throughout the entire supply chain from the point of manufacture through distribution to the ultimate sale which might be at a retail location right, is one way to think about it. But we can also look at it in a manufacturing operation where we are measuring the time and movement of assemblies through a manufacturing process.

Bill Wohl:

When we were exploring this concept earlier  People obviously think about technology, they want to trust it 100%. When it comes to inventory, and particularly when that inventory is driving the balance sheet, I think about a an old Ronald Reagan expression of trust and verify. How often are clients now completely relying on RFID? Are they using that to create a first count and then going back and assuring it? Is the technology gotten to the point where trust and verify is no longer required? This is really a technology now that can provide the kind kind of inventory or count management that can the balance sheet can be built upon.

Tom Kilianski:

Absolutely.  so generally in most RFID projects we're shooting for 99% or more  read accuracy and that would certainly rival something that's done  by an individual, right? Hans are not  100% perfect either and so 99% plus is a pretty good measure of what we can expect from most RFID implementations.

Bill Wohl:

So we talked about the movement of semi-finish goods through the manufacturing supply chain. We talked obviously about the movement of goods outbound ultimately to the conser. On several of these podcasts, we've discussed the importance of tracking returnables. Are you seeing an increasing business for RFID on returnable items?

Tom Kilianski:

You know, absolutely. That's a great use case for RFID. Manufacturers lose in some cases millions of dollars a year in returnable items that don't end up back in their facilities for reuse or  it's a matter of adjusting the stock of those returnable items to the right locations so they're there in the quantities that are required when they're needed.

Bill Wohl:

People who touch the RFID topic often ask at least I've heard this multiple times the sort of ultimate question which is how long can a tag stay energized to be useful. Early in the history of RFID there was a lot of concern about how to provide power for these sensors and tags. Today's modern RFID tags are inert. It's the it's the antenna systems that are measuring them correctly.

Tom Kilianski:

That's correct.

Bill Wohl:

Okay, great. Often when people are getting involved in these kinds of projects, they're looking for help. There are some great professional associations like AIDC and AIM. Are they the right ones to turn to for practical advice beyond going directly to the to companies like Zebra or consultants like ACSIS? These trade associations are the place where industry standards are developed. people can find more information.

Tom Kilianski:

Absolutely. There are a wide variety of different organizations that provide industry analysis as well as technology analysis that can provide you know guidelines or support on what the best approach is to applying RFID technology to real world problems.

Bill Wohl:

That's great. Tom, one last question for you as we wrap up today's podcast. If you look forward into the future of RFID, what does that look like to you? 

Tom Kilianski:

I you know I think it's really only a matter of time before it becomes absolutely ubiquitous just like the barcode is today.  as the technology continues to improve and the cost continues to go down and the  requirement to get real time visibility to any items either in your inventory or moving through the supply chain increases right. RFID is the next logical technology to be applied to solve those issues.

Bill Wohl:

That's great. Thanks, David. As we wrap up today's broadcast, we typically get to the same common question when people are facing struggles about data capture in the supply chain and it looks really difficult and complex. How do they best get started?

David Perrine:

I think Bill, it's a great question. I think Tom covered off on it just a moment ago and you covered off on it. Any journey begins with the first step in this journey is to do what we just discussed. It's to reach out to the organizations that you're familiar with who may have RFID standards in place. It is to look at the ubiquitous use of Google, you know, and then select a company like a Zebra or an ACSIS to come in and speak to you to inform you.  Look at the use cases. What I think many of the listeners might find surprising is just how many use cases there are today.  I mentioned earlier in my opening comments that this is no longer a science project. It has a very predictable outcome. The reliability of the readers and the tags as a function of tracking your inventory or your products through a process is extremely high and if not equal to what we would have come to expect with barcode. So reach out, come to companies like Zebra to ACSIS or to whoever you're comfortable with and begin this journey and you'll be quite surprised at just how advantaged you might be in buying this type of technology. 

Bill Wohl:

David, thanks  for being on the program again and for that good wrap-up advice. And Tom,  to you and the folks at Zebra, thanks for joining the podcast series. Your company plays an extraordinary role in the way the supply chain is monitored and measured and tracked. It was great having you on the program.

Tom Kilianski:

Thank you. Glad to be here. 

Bill Wohl:

That wraps up today's podcast. My thanks to ACSIS for making the series possible. We welcome your comments and questions about the discussions on these podcasts. You can engage with us at the official ACSIS’ Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. So, be part of that discussion. I'm your host, Bill Wohl. And for everyone at ACSIS, thanks for joining. We look forward to our next podcast. Talk soon.

Narrator:

Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Visibility Stories brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider. Visit us on the web at ACSISInc.com. That's ACSISinc.com or join the dialogue on social media. Look for ACSIS Inc. on LinkedIn and Twitter. Join us next time for supply chain visibility stories brought to you by ACSIS.