A great way to end the year, and usher in what promises to be an exciting and event-filled 2010!

Here’s what one one of our valued customers (Asia’s leading 3PL) had to say about the S3Edge team – To Quote:

• Commitment to quality – Responsiveness and support is top-class
• Flexibility – Willingness to accommodate changes in requirements and commitment to close up gaps in expectations 
• RFID domain expertise – Technical ability in RFID and Biztalk RFID is second to none
• Device coordination – Most impressed in getting all the different devices to work in a complex environment, shows RTVS indeed has the correct architecture and framework to support this challenging requirement

Could not have scripted it any better to cap off what truly was a remarkable year for our team – Here’s to yet another of adding tangible value to solving end-user problems!

Cheers!

/a

Happy Holidays from the S3Edge team!

The pictures on our holiday card says it all..Whether it was:

• Our CEO riding the Segway (outfitted with the RD5000 from Motorola), demonstrating the first forklift application on the Microsoft platform to an enthralled audience at RFID World,
• The President of the company rolling up his sleeves to help out with a deployment on the production lines of a Fortune 100 customer, or
• The dev team celebrating the end of yet another successful project milestone (while the test and the deployment teams were still slogging it out ) ,

We love what we do and look forward to continuing to delight you in the year ahead!

 

To the entire RTVS tribe from the S3Edge Family – Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and THANK YOU for your continued support of S3Edge!

 

The S3Edge team!

The ‘R’ in the ROI for RFID deployments , Part2 [Focus on Corporate Asset & Personnel Tracking]

In Part 2 of my 2 part series on ‘Returns’ from RFID based solution deployments (Part 1 being RFID based ROI for Vertically Integrated Manufacturers), let’s look at the benefits that our end-user community is obtaining from in the second solution area we focus on –> Corporate and Personnel Tracking with RFID.

The slides below were composed based on data gleaned from our end-user community using S3Edge’s software for Corporate Asset and Personnel Tracking in the Financial Services, & Corporate Security Industry Verticals – organizations where sensitive assets need to be protected at all times – or need to be verified in real-time along with the personnel carrying them – and often require real-time snapshots of where personnel are inside various building locations to aid in swift evacuations. So without further ado, let’s examine these scenarios and benefits in more detail:

On a related note, these scenarios are perhaps a lot more “packagable” in that a ‘1 click install’ for both web and device SW gets you up and running to achieve the desired results and I will address / showcase what I am talking about via a demo in a later post. 

As always, I’d love to get your thoughts and insights on the content and brainstorm additional areas where RFID adds value to your existing business process.

If you’d like to learn more and review a data-sheet / white-paper, along with a detailed deck on the scenarios and ROI for similar projects you are considering, send us a note at info@s3edge.com or sign up for a demo session online at www.s3edge.com

Look forward to hearing from you!

Cheers

The ‘R’ in the ROI for RFID deployments , Part1 [Focus on Vertically Integrated Manufacturers]

Building on my previous post (Er…Isn’t this really about “Execution”), in this 2 part series of posts, i’d like to illustrate the ‘Returns’ that our customers are seeing on deploying packaged SW to eliminate errors and improve productivity on their factory-floors and warehouse operations – this is not intended to be an exhaustive compilation of returns that are possible / being observed but rather a brief snapshot based on information gleaned from our end-user community using S3Edge’s software for Supply Chain Asset Tracking in the HealthCare, Pharma, 3PL, & HVAC Industry Verticals.

In Part 1, we will look at returns that Vertically Integrated Manufacturers are obtaining (where a vertically integrated business  is defined as “absorption into a single firm of several firms involved in all aspects of a product’s manufacture from raw materials to distribution”; Classic example: Carnegie Steel) by deploying packaged RFID-based software for Real-Time Visibility & Control of their assets across a close loop supply chain.

Slide #1 addresses manufacturing specific scenarios, the second slide addresses warehousing and distribution scenarios, and the way to interpret the data on the slide is as follows :

• Blue boxes on top represent existing business processes
• The middle light blue box walks through a Before and After analysis (comparing the value of RFID technology usage when compared to current existing processes, where the RFID solution was used to extend and complement the existing Line-of-Business layer vs. replacing it – and this is extremely important to be recognize)
• And finally the green box illustrates the ROI in terms of $ impact to the business when this is deployed

As always, I’d love to get your thoughts and insights on the content and brainstorm additional areas where RFID adds value to your existing business process.

If you’d like to learn more and review a data-sheet / white-paper, along with a detailed deck on the scenarios and ROI for similar projects you are considering, send us a note at info@s3edge.com or sign up for a demo session online at www.s3edge.com 

Look forward to hearing from you!

Cheers

/a

Er…Isn’t this really about “Execution”?

 

 

Source:IStockPhoto

Like me, I am sure you’ve come across some of the recent articles around why ‘broad adoption’ is taking so long to happen. These articles essentially hint that although RFID a promising technology, it has failed to keep up to it’s promise due to it’s cost and complexity.

Some of these examples include:

- RFID in 2010: Will Anyone Care (Who Doesn’t Work for an RFID Company, That Is)?

- RFID Makes Slow And Steady Progress

- If the Delivery Guy Drops Your Package, Senseaware Updates You Online

While I do not necessarily agree with some of the proposed reasons for the slow pace in adoption (ex: integration with existing LoB systems), this healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing… in fact a very good thing!

Surprised that is coming from a RFID software product vendor? Well you shouldn’t be – there’s more to this than it may at first seem. At the end of the day, a very small % of these deployments are actually succeeding in production and I believe this is due to the the large number of moving pieces and skills required to ‘pull it all together’… in other words, the real problem this industry faces can be boiled down to one word – Execution.

To elaborate, I can see why this might be happening having been on different sides of the fence. Working at Microsoft on the team that developed the RFID platform gave me strategic knowledge and deep insight into how some of the larger companies think about integrating RFID into their environments; My current job at S3Edge gives me a front row seat and tactical knowledge of the rapidly evolving hardware innovation and a deeper understanding of the day-to-day issues that a RFID deployment would need to address to be deployed successfully. My take on this has been documented and discussed in detail in my previous posts, namely:

• The changing landscape of RFID – Then and Now (with recent enabling developments)
• The Elephant in the room – why custom software solutions are almost always bad news for RFID
• Who moved the Elephants?
• Optimizing for Success: The top 5 factors that most influence a successful deployment of RFID applications in your Enterprise
• And most recently, The Top 5 habits of all successful packaged RFID applications

Michael Dortsch’s statement, “(RFID) technology is complex and costly to implement, requiring investments in the chips (ultra-high-frequency tags still run more than 7 cents apiece), readers, software, and new business processes ” is largely true because of the fact that there have been a proliferation of custom solutions and ‘packaged’ s/w offerings that are hardly configurable or easily customizeable. To date, most of the solutions that are in the market are custom developed from the device-layer up, and these solutions result in high risk and high on-going support costs, which in turn ‘is ‘hindering’ mass adoption… leaving the end-user with something that looks (unfortunately) like this…

 

Luckily, it is not all doom and gloom – there are RFID solutions out there that, with a little bit of planning and thought, can help you execute efficiently and effectively.

The most crucial step to ‘success’ is to engage with a software team with deep domain and systems expertise (hardware and software) that understands how to deploy scalable enterprise applications that are closer to the device than the LoB app. In other words, successful RFID deployments are about deploying a scalable software + hardware system that informs the enterprise application of real-world asset movements and helps control / enforce asset operations while being easily configurable and customizable . This approach is fundamentally different from trying to boil the ocean from day 0 with supply chain visibility across various trading partners, as change in process at the same time as change in technology is almost always a bad idea. Another important aspect often overlooked, from an overall successful execution standpoint, is the ability to deploy and manage software on the handheld device while is critical to the success of the overall solution. This is done via instructions to the mobile worker via hand-held / forklift terminal applications in concert with audio / visual cue’s like alarms and lights, while supporting synchronization of data across intermittently connected environments.

In summary, there are a variety of close loop applications focused on hard ROI (namely elimination of errors and increased productivity / operational efficiency due to the utilization of the technology in question (aka RFID) – applications that are adding real value to an organizations short-term and long term goals vs.. being an overhead (put in a different way: Something that the CFO would gladly sign a check for based on hard $ returns) – But it all starts with the small but perhaps the most important detail of identifying the right team that can well, … Execute

In my next post, I will discuss the scenarios and the ROI our early adopter clients are seeing in the vertically integrated manufacturing arena (close loop discrete manufacturing + ware house ops scenarios) – stay tuned and as always send me any comments / thoughts that you may have on the above, or content you’d like to see more of here.

Until next time,

Cheers

/a

Enabling a proactive Product Recall Solution with RFID

If you’ve been watching any of the TV news channels over the last few days you could not have missed the amount of public outcry / outrage at the peanut contamination  issues or the largest recall ever executed (Govt issues record 2.1M recall for dropside cribs) that have been affecting our daily lives / lifestyle….

In our last post, we sought to seek answers around how a new breed of product recall solutions could be enabled to prevent contaminated goods from reaching us (the end consumers) in the first place  and prevent such unsavory incidents from happening again.

An approach to tackling (and solving) this issue we believe is to utilize the real time visibility that RFID tags can provide in the supply chain to search, locate, and remove tainted goods. Simply put, RFID tags on items (on items or containers of homogeneous items at the time of manufacturing) will provide us the automatic visibility required to ‘track and trace’ goods as they flow through the supply chain, resulting in a observational system that allows for a proactive recall solution to be implemented.

Over the next few paragraphs, I will provide, in ‘tech-speak’, an under the cover look into the moving pieces that need to come together for such a solution to be implemented and adopted across the supply chain. If you are more interested in understanding what you need to do as a manufacturer to put this ‘early warning system’ in place or if you a consumer who is wondering what needs to be done to prevent these tainted goods from reaching you in the first place,   feel free to skip and go straight to the first clip of a live demo that I recorded (working prototype built on top of our existing RTVS based warehouse visibility solution) to showcase the solution at work.

The S3Edge 3 tier “On-Device, On-Premise, On-Demand” architecture is a service oriented approach to deploying and executing Software + Services on device, edge, and cloud to harness operational visibility in real time in your business processes.

The moving pieces in this approach are typically characterized by:

1. 1. Execution of Physical World Workflow’s On-Device to go from tag or sensor observations to actions
2. 2. A central workflow controller On-Premise that is responsible for the design and deployment of the physical world workflows in addition to facilitating remote management of RFID and sensor devices
3. 3. Services On-Demand (i.e. in the cloud) for federated real-time visibility via the cloud. These could be a combination of .NET Services for distributed notifications across firewalls, SQL Data Services for rich data aggregation, and the Windows Azure platform to host applications in the cloud

The “On-Device, On-Premise, On-Demand” architecture thus scales from a basic solution of providing a closed loop On-Premise + On-Device solution for an organization looking to incorporate real time visibility into their business processes within 4 walls to  utilizing Software + Services for federated visibility across the extended enterprise, and revolutionizing the notion of real-time visibility on tap.

At the recently concluded Gartner AADI conference we showcased how a Internet scale ‘search and locate’ application to initiate and execute product recall across the extended enterprise could be designed and executed with Software On-Premise and On-Device, and Services On-Demand (.NET Services + SQL Data Services in the cloud). Key features of the RTVS based Product Recall solution that I demonstrated included:

• Enabling of supply chain managers to ask: “Where are my products right now?” and get a response back in real-time from distributed locations across the supply chain
• Publishing of global product recall alerts across the extended enterprise, and enable all affected parties (ex: warehouse managers or retailers)  to get an instantaneous snapshot of “Products within my 4 walls that are dangerous”
• Abilities for all affected parties to schedule and execute a recall in-house, and be able to provide status to initiator in a secure manner

 

The clips below shows how such a system would work from soup to nuts.

Enjoy and as always keep the conversation going and the questions coming!

Cheers

 

/a

Skype Anush @ AllThingsRTVS

OnWindows features S3Edge: RFID tracking goods and assets

RFID has evolved into a key technology for tracking goods and assets around the world, and is becoming critical to an efficient supply chain.

Lindsay James finds out more with commentary from Microsoft, S3Edge, and other RFID partners.

Read more about it at

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/RFID-tracking-goods-and-assets/4175/Default.aspx

 

Cheers

 

/a

S3Edge called out as a leading RFID innovator in recent RetailEDI article

Here’s a great read from RetailEDI that got recently published –

RFID – Something Retailers are Looking at…

Was a lot of fun interacting with Jim on this and it’s great to see his final opinions validate our core focus at S3Edge, specially:

• Focusing on adding value to a customers’ needs by helping them deploy a close-loop system with well understood ROI, within their 4 walls [typically to increase process efficiencies, reduce or eliminate errors, and increase labor utilization / productivity]
• Staying away from ‘open loop’ mandates, which in turn requires lots of touch points that need to fall in place, and much harder to show demonstrable ROI (and is typically a  compliance play initially with no ROI to supply chain collaborators)
• Providing a packaged software offering with rich out of the capabilities that can be easily customized and extended with standard development tools (vs. proprietary tools such as the OAT environment) and has the following unique characteristics:
  • Designed for connection to existing controlling enterprise applications
  • No proprietary development environment to learn and support (built completely on the Microsoft platform)
  • Architected to maintain a clear separation between based product and customization to support long-term maintainability

If you are in the market for a packaged asset tracking RFID offering that will scale with your requirements over time, drop us a line at info@s3edge.com – we’d love to understand your scenarios / requirements better and show you what we’ve got!

Until my next post,

Cheers

/a

[Skype Anush at AllThingsRTVS]

Slides from MIT Enterprise Forum talk on Multi-Enterprise Visibility

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of presenting an approach for multi-enterprise visibility using S3Edge software in the cloud, on-premise, and on-mobile devices (previous blog post here)

A member of the RTVS Tribe recently pointed out to me that the URL for the slides from the Auto ID website (http://autoid.mit.edu/cs/) was broken (thank you Mike!) – Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

 

 

If you are interested in more slides on S3Edge software / approach to building and deploying Real-Time Visibility Systems, check out my earlier blog post on S3 Edge Software Explained or the following links to case studies for Warehouse Visibility and Work-in-Process asset tracking solutions that have been deployed at Rite-Care Pharmacy and GkB Hi-tech / Carl Zeiss

· Pharmacy Chain Cuts Order Turnaround Time in Half with Mobile RFID Workflow Solution

· Lens Manufacturer Optimizes Order Management with RFID Technology

Cheers

/a

Technorati Tags: rfid ppt,MIT Enterprise Forum,RFID,RFID 2.0,SaaS,S+S,SaaS RFID,S3Edge,RTVS solutions,RTVS,RiteCare,GKB Hi-tech,Multi-enterprise Visibility,Azure,AWS,Product Recall,rfid system,rfid cloud,MIT,Auto-ID

The Top 5 habits of all successful, packaged RFID applications

Source: www.istockphoto.com

In my last post, we talked about the top 5 critical factors to design for while deploying an enterprise wide real-time visibility system strategy with RFID. 

In this post, I will address what a ‘packaged’ application really means and the ‘Top 5’ characteristics to look for while choosing a packaged vendor

A number of vendors on the market have announced "packaged" applications. Here are some ways to read through the marketing literature to understand the real level of packaging:

1) Simple out of the box installation: Is there a binary installable offering (like a Microsoft installer or setup file). Can the customer IT organization use this to create a deployment instance, or does it need professional services even to just install and get it configured?

2) Clear demarcation between "product" and customization, at the binary level: A large number of "packaged" offerings involve starting from source code and changing it. This is an unsupportable recipe – For fixes and enhancements to be really applied, and breaking changes to be identified and fixed, binary base product is a pre-requisite.

3) Deep leverage of standard development tools: (1) and (2) are possible with completely integrated offerings from proprietary solution vendors, but if customization involves learning a new language, toolset, debuggers, or development methodology, the cost of enhancements will be prohibitive and non-scalable.

4) ‘Centralizable’, remote administration: Even in RFID deployments of scale with multiple support centers, the RFID expertise tends to be concentrated in small numbers of experienced IT departments. They need to be able to get to all the deployed instances and manage them effectively. This has to be self-service oriented, where administrators can completely administer all aspects of their application, including finding devices and antennas that are not working, replacing and adding new devices, configuring user administration, and delegating these capabilities in a self-service manner.

5) Rich out of the box functionality: Yes customization is inevitable for the following layers of the overall deployment:

• Presentation
• Integration,
• Reporting, and
• Human workflow,

…since each organization will want to view the RFID solution in the context of their overall enterprise architecture.

But minimizing the customization to just these areas, without violating tenets (1-4) means the rest of the application, particularly as it pertains to RFID and device specifics, have to be clearly separable and outside the realm of the customization – Typically this means significant out of the box functionality at the RFID level.

Hopefully, this gives you insight into what to look for in a truly packaged application to solve your needs for a real-time visibility system, and you found this useful and valuable.

Looking forward to discussing and demo’ing capabilities of real-time visibility systems from S3Edge that demonstrate #1 through #5 above for your asset tracking needs in discrete manufacturing and warehouse operations! Stay tuned for the next post (and this will be a good customer scenario / ROI focused post! )

 

Cheers!

/a

Technorati Tags: S3Edge,Real Time Visibility,Real Time Visibility Systems,RTVS solutions,RTVS,RFID 2.0,Packaged RFID solutions,5 habits of succeful packaged RFID applications,Anush Kumar,Ram Venkatesh