Pilot employs dual frequencies to track electronics By Peter A. Buxbaum, AJOT A consortium of European companies is conducting a pilot which combines European and North American radio frequency identification standards to track trans-Atlantic cargo. Kuehne + Nagel, a global logistics provider based in Schindellegi, Switzerland, said the project marks the first time such a trans-Atlantic system has been tested. The pilot is of particular significance because it is tracking cargo at the unit, or individual product, level. Proponents of unit-level tracking claim that it can substantially increase the efficiency of supply chains, particularly in retailing, by reducing inventories and their associated costs, eliminating shrinkage, and increasing sales by ensuring product availability. The Kuehne + Nagel pilot tracks product from a Munich factory to a New Jersey distribution center. RFID technology is also increasingly being considered for cargo security applications. Advanced RFID tags can determine whether shipments have been diverted and whether they have been tampered with. “We want to learn more about the employment of RFID under real conditions and at the same time to meet the growing customer demand for RFID,” said Alexander Unruh, Kuehne + Nagel’s RFID pilot project manager, explaining what prompted the company to undertake the pilot. Leading US retailers, most notably Wal-Mart, as well as the US Department of Defense, are among the leading proponents of RFID tracking. Kuehne + Nagel’s partners in the venture are the Munich-based Siemens Business Services, Frankfurt-based Lufthansa Cargo, and printing systems manufacturer Océ, a Munich-based company. Siemens provides support for hardware, software and processes, handles the integration of the data in Océ‚s enterprise resource management system, and provides the control of the RFID readers with a server application. The RFID process starts at the Océ manufacturing plant near Munich, where printers and accessory kits are tagged with RFID transponders that operate within both the standard European and US frequency ranges. In Europe, the standard RFID reading frequency band is 868 MHz, and in the US it is 915 MHz, both within the ultra high frequency, or UHF, frequency range. When the consignments are dispatched, a forklift truck passes through a reading station, or RFID gate, where the information stored on the tags is read and transmitted to a central host. At Kuehne + Nagel’s warehouse at Munich Airport, the consignments pass a further RFID checkpoint and are then handed over to Lufthansa Cargo. The next radio frequency checkpoint along the supply chain, located at Lufthansa Cargo’s New York warehouse, marks the switch from European and US RFID standards. There the tags are read again and the shipments forwarded to Océ’s US distribution hub in Mount Laurel, NJ, where they pass through a final RFID gate. All data are transmitted to Kuehne + Nagel’s tracking and tracing system and made available online. Electronic Product Code The focus of the project, according to Unruh, is the establishment of a common RFID standard for “open supply chains.” “Open supply chains involve suppliers, distributors, the logistics provider and other parties reading the RFID tags,” he noted. “Working together with our partners across the pilot project’s supply chain, this concept of RFID standardization is one of our main foci. We have therefore built a special data concept that meets EPC recommendations and takes the special needs of the logistics business into consideration.” EPC, or Electronic Product Code, is, in addition to RFID tagging, another technology component involved in unit-level tracking. EPC is a protocol developed at the Auto-ID Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which allows automated systems to capture individual product codes. It is designed to replace the Universal Product Code, or barcode, which is not designed for individual product tracking. The tags and data protocols used in Kuehne + Nagel’s RFID pilot a