Interagency Logisitics – a new RFID model for DoD

The DoD is not known for cooperation nor agility. Projects costing billions of dollars often drag on years late because of stovepipe organizations that refuse to be knocked down. One of the keys to making the US Department of Defense Mission Capable is having what I have coined “Maneuver Logistics” assisted by 21st century technology. Technology that helps break down those silos and creates Interagency Logistics initiatives.

Maneuver Warfare is at the forefront of today’s Defense Department, sometimes it is referred to as fourth generation warfare. Essentially it means small rapid forces engaged in often ambiguous areas of combat against non-traditional enemies. Following the principles espoused by John Boyd – visibility, agility, and fast decision cycles (Boyd refers to these as OODA loops) is often at the heart of Maneuver Warfare.

This style of combat – the antithesis of building up attrition based armies to fight near-peer enemies– requires strong support of non-kinetic missions like logistics. Materiel has to move faster and more vastly than ever before to support Maneuver Warfare. That can’t happen with 30 year old logistics processes and technology and it won’t work unless there is Interagency Logistics systems. A single standard and an electronic platform that spans not only the DoD but all NATO forces is critical to achieving success. RFID is one of those transformational technologies.

RFID must be seamless and vertically integrated to enable Maneuver Logistics. It can’t be putting up a bunch of portals at warehouse doors and expect an immediate change. One retired four star general saw ODIN’s SMART Container – an integrated RFID, GPS, SATCOM and active RFID solution and commented that it’s like a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) for logistics. What he meant was the automated RFID technology was like having two soldiers inside each container that could call in at regular intervals and report the location, condition and count of what was inside the container. This is the type of platform that removes soldiers and sailors from non-kinetic activity and can put them to better use and it is also technology based on a DoD standards so it spans not only our DOD, but the UK and Australia’s MOD and other NATO armies.

If interagency logistics is the future of the US Department of Defense agencies must build joint capabilities based on Maneuver Logistics with 21st century technology. Soldiers can’t act as fast as a computer and can’t move with zero errors. We would never think of sending up pilots without the latest radar, tracking, or stealth technology, why should the teams that support them not have the same competitive advantages? The future for the DOD interagency logistics will depend on transformational technologies like ODIN’s RFID solutions to bridge that gaps that people may not or cannot span. Transformational technologies like active and passive RFID will have to be brought forward so they are easy to adapt and easy to use across joint forces around the globe.

Interagency Logistics – a new model for RFID in the DoD

The DoD is not known for cooperation nor agility. Projects costing billions of dollars often drag on years late because of stovepipe organizations that refuse to be knocked down. One of the keys to making the US Department of Defense Mission Capable is having what I have coined “Maneuver Logistics” assisted by 21st century technology. Technology that helps break down those silos and creates Interagency Logistics initiatives.

Maneuver Warfare is at the forefront of today’s Defense Department, sometimes it is referred to as fourth generation warfare. Essentially it means small rapid forces engaged in often ambiguous areas of combat against non-traditional enemies. Following the principles espoused by John Boyd – visibility, agility, and fast decision cycles (Boyd refers to these as OODA loops) is often at the heart of Maneuver Warfare.

This style of combat – the antithesis of building up attrition based armies to fight near-peer enemies– requires strong support of non-kinetic missions like logistics. Materiel has to move faster and more vastly than ever before to support Maneuver Warfare. That can’t happen with 30 year old logistics processes and technology and it won’t work unless there is Interagency Logistics systems. A single standard and an electronic platform that spans not only the DoD but all NATO forces is critical to achieving success. RFID is one of those transformational technologies.

RFID must be seamless and vertically integrated to enable Maneuver Logistics. It can’t be putting up a bunch of portals at warehouse doors and expect an immediate change. One retired four star general saw ODIN’s SMART Container – an integrated RFID, GPS, SATCOM and active RFID solution and commented that it’s like a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) for logistics. What he meant was the automated RFID technology was like having two soldiers inside each container that could call in at regular intervals and report the location, condition and count of what was inside the container. This is the type of platform that removes soldiers and sailors from non-kinetic activity and can put them to better use and it is also technology based on a DoD standards so it spans not only our DOD, but the UK and Australia’s MOD and other NATO armies.

If interagency logistics is the future of the US Department of Defense agencies must build joint capabilities based on Maneuver Logistics with 21st century technology. Soldiers can’t act as fast as a computer and can’t move with zero errors. We would never think of sending up pilots without the latest radar, tracking, or stealth technology, why should the teams that support them not have the same competitive advantages? The future for the DOD interagency logistics will depend on transformational technologies like RFID to0 bridge that gaps that people may not or cannot span. Transformational technologies like active and passive RFID will have to be brought forward so they are easy to adapt and easy to use across joint forces around the globe.

ODIN reporting from RFID Journal Live live– Twitter by the experts for you!

Here at ODIN I’ve made it a personal commitment that we are good industry stewards first and foremost. When I wrote RFID for Dummies I gave away what many people in the industry thought were our trade secrets– how to do a proper site survey, get a macro view on how RF behaves and understand the physics. When we published the first Benchmark it hurt our relationship with hardware vendors, because no one likes to hear their shortcomings, but it helped end-users understand what was important and made the industry better performing. Those are two big examples of ODIN being good RFID stewards. We’re continuing that tradition this coming week in Orlando.
ODIN’s experts will be reporting on the newest and most exciting events from RFID Journal Live 2009 in real time over Twitter. We’re setting up a system so other show attendees can add in their opinions of events and products.
For those of you who don’t use Twitter don’t worry – we’ve solved that problem too. You can go to www.RFIDTweets.com or www.RFIDtwits.com. All the comments sent in by ODIN engineers and other show attendees will be aggregated for you to review on that site over a normal browser.
If you have a Twitter account and are going to the show we’ve got a hashtag set-up:
ODIN has created the hashtag #RFIDJL .
If you don’t know how to use hashtags it’s real simple. Before you submit a tweet put in #RFIDJL then write your tweet and hit send. This will allow our search API to automatically pick up anything written about RFID Journal Live and add it to the site, or allow users to search it easily on Twitter.
During a time of tough economic times and tight budgets ODIN is trying to do what we can to help those folks interested in RFID who can’t be at the show in real time. I hope you find it useful and as always let us know if you have any ideas for improvements.

ODIN reporting from RFID Journal Live live– Twitter by the experts for you!

Here at ODIN I’ve made it a personal commitment that we are good industry stewards first and foremost. When I wrote RFID for Dummies I gave away what many people in the industry thought were our trade secrets– how to do a proper site survey, get a macro view on how RF behaves and understand the physics. When we published the first Benchmark it hurt our relationship with hardware vendors, because no one likes to hear their shortcomings, but it helped end-users understand what was important and made the industry better performing. Those are two big examples of ODIN being good RFID stewards. We’re continuing that tradition this coming week in Orlando.
ODIN’s experts will be reporting on the newest and most exciting events from RFID Journal Live 2009 in real time over Twitter. We’re setting up a system so other show attendees can add in their opinions of events and products.
For those of you who don’t use Twitter don’t worry – we’ve solved that problem too. You can go to www.RFIDTweets.com or www.RFIDtwits.com. All the comments sent in by ODIN engineers and other show attendees will be aggregated for you to review on that site over a normal browser.
If you have a Twitter account and are going to the show we’ve got a hashtag set-up:
ODIN has created the hashtag #RFIDJL .
If you don’t know how to use hashtags it’s real simple. Before you submit a tweet put in #RFIDJL then write your tweet and hit send. This will allow our search API to automatically pick up anything written about RFID Journal Live and add it to the site, or allow users to search it easily on Twitter.
During a time of tough economic times and tight budgets ODIN is trying to do what we can to help those folks interested in RFID who can’t be at the show in real time. I hope you find it useful and as always let us know if you have any ideas for improvements.

RFID is here to stay – sorry Katherine Albrecht

f anyone really wondered whether RFID was here to stay or not, let me give you the most unequivocal proof I’ve seen yet that it’s here to stay. Before I do, however I’d like to make a suggestion to that bastion of privacy in our public world – Katherine Albrecht and the folks over at Caspian. I suggest that she focus her effort around the mobile phone companies and the non-stop onslaught of location based products they are embedding in phones. As I tend to do with most electronic stuff, I decimated my latest crackberry and turned it in for a new one. The new one has a GPS coordinate for everything from taking pictures to dialing 911. Verizon, by default, knows where I am every moment I’ve got my phone in my pocket. That’s technology that actually can track you, not Hollywood shoot-an-RFID-chip-in-your neck-and-track-you-from-a-helicopter fiction. So Katherine, for all those who get a new mobile phone and don’t know enough to disable the GPS features and location-based programs – get after the phone companies. Shockingly, when I disabled the GPS devices in my phone I got a blue screen with the numbers 666 on it in flaming red– the mark of the beast!1

So back to my point; what is this unequivocal proof that RFID is here to stay? Ski bums and grandmoms love the technology. For those of you who follow me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/PJSweeney) you’ll know I spent this past weekend in Vail catching the last few feet of fresh powder before I headed out west to see clients. As I bought my lift ticket the woman asked me if I’d like my picture taken for an “RF card” I asked her about it and sure enough they printed up a fresh UHF Gen 2.0 card right at the counter with my smiling mug on it. I was at the Gondola not five minutes later and the gunslinging cowboy (with both hands full in the picture (below) scanned my card (underneath my jacket and back-pack) at the same time he was scanning someone next to me. Sure enough my picture popped up on his Intermec hand-held.

two intermec handheld readers Time for some field work on my part. Why the two RFID readers? I asked.

“I can do two lines at the same time, listening for each beep to make sure dudes have a valid RF pass. I don’t have to see the ticket, just point and shoot. Sometimes I’ll ask what’s your name or birthday, or just look on the gun at the picture. Jokers scamming lift tickets is history, bra.”

Well said, I thought.

I was surprised by the near complete lack of lines on a Saturday during spring break with 18’ of new powder, but the mountain is even happier about the very rapid return on investment from the elimination of stolen, fake, or borrowed passes. RFID is also part of their green initiative, folks reuse the RF cards, no more killing trees to print up stickers flapping from your zipper.

More field work. I asked a few skiers about the RFID system while riding the gondola, and I even played devil’s advocate and asked about privacy concerns. People looked at me as if I was a freak. What part didn’t I understand they seemed to wonder; shorter lift lines or better for the environment?

One woman went so far as to ask me if they could tell what lift her kids were last at – I told her they could if they would put up a few portals and a couple of kiosks. Another woman asked if they could put a chip in her grandson’s shoes in case he got lost or abducted. While I didn’t go into technical details I did come to the realization over this weekend that the convenience of RFID in the consumer market is just starting to emerge. Like the use of credit cards, the privacy aspect is far outweighed by benefit to normal everyday people.

For a couple of years now people have seen value in closed-loop business applications like IT asset tracking, returnable totes, WIP tracking, medical device tagging etc. The use of RFID in the ski area, or as Daniel Connolly wrote about in an earlier blog at a water park, is clearly evidence that the value the technology provides far outweighs the concern over privacy. With five cent tags coming out of china and companies providing consumer kits for people to build your own applications, it’s only a matter of time before RFID is everywhere. I couldn’t be happier, it will make the world a more efficient and more safer place. And if it means more runs per hour then I’ll thank RFID for more fun too!

two intermec handheld readers

1Of course I’m joking about the Mark of the Beast. Some privacy fanatics have taken the interpretation that an RFID chip is actually the mark of the beast, which, as an intelligent reader, you realize is ludicrous.

Ask the RFID Expert: combating imperfect information in markets

The free Ask the RFID Expert service offered by ODIN is two weeks old and it is clear it is filling a gap in the industry. To date we have received questions ranging from tracking cooking oil to the EPC Global ALE standard, from tracking laptops to RFID’s impact on biologics. Believe it or not, there is a common thread here; these questions are common.

That’s right. We have heard each of them before and answered them. It’s a perfect example of imperfect information in the market. Most capitalist financial theory rests on the foundation of perfect information available to investors. When information is imperfect or available only to a select few you get insider trading, fraud, and investor disenchantment with the system. Organizations such as the Securities and Exchange Commission regulate financial markets to enable more perfect information sharing through 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and countless other documents. Without some sense that the system is fair and that information is readily available to investors and potential investors alike, the market is seen as rigged and no one puts his faith, confidence or money into it.

So how does this relate to RFID? Anyone with even the vaguest experience in RFID will know immediately that imperfect information is the rule. This is in part because the technology applications are so broad that no one has a clear view to all permutations. However, the bigger issue is the typical sources of RFID information, vendors, have specific agendas to advance and are often ill-informed on even the most basic facts. ODIN thankfully has accumulated those basic facts and a great deal of in-depth information over the past seven years. The Ask the RFID Expert service is our way of making that information available in an objective, unbiased venue. Since we don’t make tags or readers but have scientifically benchmarked and installed them in real-world settings globally, we have some facts to share.

When ODIN’s founder, Patrick Sweeney, authored RFID for Dummies for John Wiley & Sons in 2005 we discussed an important question at ODIN. If we put our latest knowledge in the book, will we be hurting ourselves by getting our competitors up the learning curve faster? The answer was yes and we did it anyway. The viewpoint we took was that a better educated end user will lead to better uses of the technology; better educated implementers will lead to more RFID success which will be good for the industry. Some basic information sharing and standardization is good for everyone. Industry old-timers may also recall that ODIN faced this same dilemma in 2004 when we first started publishing the RFID Benchmark Series™. Through our testing we were learning more about tag and reader performance than anyone in the industry and we published the data for all to see.

Ask the RFID Expert is just our latest innovation to educate the market. We hope it provides more perfect information for the RFID market (providers and users), enables better decisions about how to properly deploy and use the technology, and increases the confidence and faith of end users.

Ask your own question of the RFID Expert in the top right corner of the ODIN website and receive an answer in 24 hours.

2009 RFID PREDICTIONS FROM THE GUY WHO BROUGHT YOU RFID FOR DUMMIES Written by Patrick J Sweeney II

Tuesday, 27 January 2009  Living just outside of Washington, DC where every pundit with a corner of print or a microphone is compelled to make his or her predictions about what will happen in 2009, I would feel journalistically inadequate if I didn’t take a stab at my predictions. Without getting into my real passion – where the Red Sox will end the season – I’ll do my best to keep this to the area I know best – RFID.

Here are my Nine for ‘09

1. Cisco buys Alien’s reader business – Alien’s tag and chip business is skyrocketing, but they don’t have the distribution channel to compete in the more competitive hardware market. Competition is not that formidable in tags and cost are already sunk into R&D on the Higgs III silicon. They clean up their balance sheet, get a cash infusion and become a tag and chip company. Cisco buys them in a down market, and leverages their infrastructure to further go head-to-head with Moto in the wireless world.

2. Reader manufacturers outsource their RFID – there are too many reader manufacturers and too many board manufacturers. Buckets of money is still being sunk into R&D by the board manufactures; reader vendors can’t match that level of innovation. There are two clear winners in this market – ThingMagic and MTI. Look for them to provide boards for the top three readers in 2009.

3. Three reader manufacturers go away – See point two – too many reader makers. Alien will get bought, Feig will exit the market and Sirit will get bought, possibly in an asset sale. Why? Point one covers Alien or possible Cisco buys Sirit. Feig has a poor product and terrible customer service. The market is too competitive for clients to put up with bad service and a bad product. Sirit has a small portion of the electronic vehicle registration (EVR) market and won’t see meaningful impact from the Department of Defense (DoD) passive RFID IDIQ until September, so at their stock price today it’s a bargain for one of their competitors to buy their R&D and contracts.

4. A million servers are tagged with RFID – The financial services industry has led the way with two banks tagging over 100,000 assets and driving a rapid and tangible ROI. Hosting companies, telecoms, government agencies, and other large data center users are going to follow suit this year. ODIN technologies’ pre-packaged data center solution is already looking like one of our top three products of 2009.

5. The Container World adopts passive RFID – Active RFID and Savi tags can only provide so much visibility, this year passive infrastructure will be leveraged for security and real time inventory. Look for DoD to lead the charge and shipping companies to be fast followers.

6. The DoD begins “Googling their stuff” – GSS Army GS MC is coming online and NMCI is phasing out. This will make RFID applications easier to certify and adopt, and user interfaces will be better. A General in the Pentagon will be able to “Google” any thing they are looking for and find it on a map point, in real time. That has massive implications for the DoD supply chain.

7. Utilities enter the RFID market – this industry is a sleeper largely because of the physics of ground penetration. The good news is the innovation and technology investment are making it viable. This could be the sleeper market of 2009 that no one has even mentioned, despite 3M putting some big bucks into it.

8. An RFID company files an S-1 – who will it be? I’ve got a couple of bets but because of NDAs, market impact, and our tax-evading Secretary of Treasury I won’t say. Short of a total economic meltdown November will bring a road show that leads to a successful IPO in Q1 2010.

9. The Red Sox win their third World Series of the millennium – OK I can’t resist. The Evil Empire opened up their wallet and bought the hottest commodity on the market, but with no middle relief and no young closer the season will come down to the Red Sox middle order against the Ray’s pitching. Mark Shapiro gets manager of the year for bringing the Indians to game seven against the Sox for the second time in three years with half the payroll.

RFID for Datacenters is a “No Brainer” according to Bank of America

Bank of America is one of the few healthy banks left standing – well was until they tried to swallow ML, but that’s a longer story. When their talented IT professionals call something a “no-brainer” it’s time to listen up. That’s exactly what happened last week. I spoke at the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) and Banking Information Technology (BITS) annual meeting in Sarasota. I was on the stage with both Bill Conroy from Bank of America and Mike Russo of Wells Fargo. Collectively they have tagged hundreds of thousands of data center assets with passive radio frequency identification (RFID).

Conroy started out by saying to the audience of about 150 bank IT executives that using RFID is a ‘no-brainer’ in the data center. The ability to execute asset tracking and improve security in only a fraction of the time as using manual or line-of-site methods allows him to re-allocate assets to areas that drive strong ROI for the bank. He also said it was easy – rolling out five data centers in 13 weeks.

Russo also made the point that you need to have strong champion who believes in the technology. It was clear they both thought users need to plan for support with an automated system and as Conroy said have a “good handle on the phsyics” because the technology is challenging in their data center where they store servers in “Gaussian cages. “

The bottom line of the panel was the following:

• IT Assets need to be more accurately and automatically tracked
• Trust experts to overcome the challenges with the physics, all hardware is not created equal
• Banks need to replace the 35-year old bar code technology with something from the 21^st century
• The efficiency drives an ROI in under 12 months
• You need a strong champion in the bank because there will be a lot of people resisting change
• The latent data realized when things are tracked automatically in real-time drives benefits that users never thought possible
• Just do it! (before your competitors get further up the curve)

As a side note, ODIN has a new low-profile data center cart that works with our data center tracking solution that’s not only very effective but about half the cost of the old systems. Drop me a note if you want to hear more about it.