MaSSSoftech

Even in a down economy, the industrial RFID market is still expected to grow about 10% in 2009, one of the only segments of the automatic data collection industry on the uptick this year.



Manufacturers may not be slapping very many RFID tags on cases and pallets before they ship them out the door, but business is discovering new ways to track valuable assets with RFID technology. And, the industry continues to come up with new technologies and systems to enable these new solutions.



Last week, I talked to Tom Pavela, CEO of Omni-ID, a 3-1/2 year old spin-off from Kinetic, about a new portfolio of high performance tags the company is about to release. Omni-ID has developed passive RFID UHF tags that bring together five characteristics:



* Unlike typical EPC tags, they can work in harsh environments including metals and liquids and temperatures of up to 120 C.



* They offer higher memory than typical tags, up to 512 bits of memory.



*They have read rates of over 100 feet, which makes them appropriate for tracking containers in a port or trailers in a yard.



* They are built around a global broadband standard that allows them to operate in a global supply chain without giving up performance.



* And, because they use passive technology, they are less expensive than comparable active tags.



Omni-ID, for instance, developed a niche with solutions to track and trace high value equipment in the information technology industry. For instance, customers use them to keep track of servers, which involve a lot of metal. Taking the lessons learned from that industry, Omni-ID is now looking to move into new markets, like aerospace and defense, logistics and transportation, manufacturing and even retail. “We are working on a solution for Sam’s Club to place tags on the metal beams on their racks, not their cases and pallets,” says Pavela. “When a lift truck driver puts a pallet away on the rack in a store, a reader on the lift truck reads the tag to confirm the putaway location.”


It's an indication of where the industry might be going. "We’ve discovered there are a lot of potential applications beyond trying to tag items and cartons that go out into the supply chain,” says Pavela. “Our focus, and where we think RFID is really gaining traction, is in closed-loop environments.”