Xtreme Metal Tag designed for mounting on metal substrates in challenging environments

- Avery Dennison RFID, a business of Avery Dennison (NYSE: AVY), and Xtreme RFID, a Cascade Engineering company, have collaborated to create the highly-durable, RFID-based Xtreme Metal Tag. To create the tag, Avery Dennison RFID’s AD-843 is encased in plastic via a custom injection molding process developed by Xtreme RFID. The finished Xtreme Metal Tag is 5.75L x 2.4W x 0.31H inches.

Mike Lewis, Xtreme RFID Business Unit Manager says, “The AD-843 was clearly the best choice for the Xtreme Metal Tag. It meets or exceeds each one of our requirements including a minimum 6-foot read range on metal substrates. Since metal can impede radio waves, we were additionally pleased with the AD-843 performance. And, the AD-843’s ample surface area and robust chip-to-antenna connection provide superior durability during our proprietary converting process.”

George Dyche, Avery Dennison RFID Product Manager comments, “We felt confident the AD-843 could deliver on Xtreme RFID’s high performance criteria. Mike Lewis’ team put the tag through some pretty intense testing in both laboratory and real-world conditions and the AD-843 passed with flying colors.”

The Xtreme Metal Tag can be used in a variety of applications such as solid waste & recycling, material handling and asset tracking. One notable application is steel dumpster tagging. RFID readers onboard the collection trucks identify the tagged dumpster via its Xtreme Metal Tag’s pre-encoded identification number. The reader notes the date and time of pickup, and if the load is weighed, the weight of the trash collected, and then associates it with that specific dumpster in the company’s backend database for analysis.

Visibility to this data allows the company to both save money by optimizing its resources and increase revenue by refining its billing processes.

More product details can be found at http://xtremerfid.com/rfid-tags/xtreme-rfid-tag-metal. Or contact Mike Lewis at  616-975-4846 or mike.lewis@cascadeng.com.

Xtreme RFID makes use of the considerable experience and core competencies of Cascade Engineering, its parent company, in product design and engineering; material science, and technology development, as well as partnerships with companies like Avery Dennison, to bring a full system approach to the RFID market with tags, hardware and software.

Avery Dennison RFID is a recognized market leader in the design and manufacture of RFID tags, labels and inlays with extensive expertise in developing and supporting RF technology and related applications.

RFID has proven to be a problem solver for both straightforward and visionary applications. But its potential is in its earliest stage.

By Jack Farrell, VP/GM Avery Dennison RFID, Friday, January 20, 2012

RFID is a proven enabler of profitability that’s growing more powerful every day. Microchip sensitivity is improving. Support services are maturing. Companion technologies, such as sensors, are being successfully integrated into chips. And smaller tags are opening the gate for multitudes of potential applications previously thought too small to accommodate an RFID tag. A tag measuring only 23 x 5 mm, for example, was released to the market within just the past few weeks.

What first came to prominence as a solution to track cases and pallets in distribution centers, has steadily and profitably migrated to heavier industries and related service sectors. RFID applications are taking hold in fields as diverse as mining, electronics, medical equipment and corrosion monitoring. More, RFID can now address many applications in proximity to metals and liquids. The latest technology is enabling businesses to tag products ranging from kegs of beer to petroleum and chemicals.

A tip of the hat to retailers: The RFID implementation processes that retailing largely pioneered are making it easier for manufacturing concerns to adopt the technology. Models for creating RFID business cases, for example, and templates for launching RFID projects exist that would otherwise need to be produced from scratch. Research and investment by vendors to improve the technology will always be a part of RFID advancement, but retailers can reasonably be said to have led the evolution from analog to digital data capture technology. It was retailers who demonstrated how data capture could be improved from a bar code’s 70% reliability to RFID’s 97% reliability, which translates to a host of cost-saving efficiencies.

To the top tier of manufacturing management, RFID’s continuing technical achievements and its proven value in hundreds of industrial applications present huge opportunities for competitive differentiation, problem solving and ultimately, solid rewards on the balance sheet.

Read the whole article at Industry Week, Manufacturing Technology.

FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga., December 14, 2011 – Avery Dennison RFID, a business of Avery Dennison Corporation (NYSE: AVY), has introduced the AD-110m5, a new near-field inlay measuring just .91 x .20 in (23 x 5 mm).  The AD-110m5’s small size, along with its insensitivity to liquids, plastics and other RF-unfriendly materials, helps meet the exacting demands of many item-level tracking applications.

“We’ve seen a lot of situations where the business case for item-level tracking was there but the right inlay was not,” says Maggie Bidlingmaier, Avery Dennison RFID global director of sales and marketing. “The AD-110m5’s robust characteristics should meet those needs and open up new possibilities for applications that call for smaller, high-performance item-level RFID inlays.”

Avery Dennison RFID Product Manager George Dyche explains the new inlay’s unique set of performance characteristics. “The AD-110m5 is a complete package for many item-level applications. Not only is it one of the industry’s slimmest, its total surface area is one-third that of comparable tags while delivering similar performance. And, the AD-110m5 is also generally not fazed by many materials that typically interfere with RF signals, especially liquids,” says Dyche. “Combining those characteristics with the AD-110m5’s durable construction makes this inlay ideal for embedding right at the point when a product is being manufactured.”

The inlay uses the Impinj® Monza® 5 microchip, which allowed for a smaller inlay design while maintaining high read/write rates and reliability.

“We expect Avery Dennison’s new AD-110m5 inlay to enable many new RFID applications thanks to its ability to deliver unusually high sensitivity in a very small package,” said Scot Stelter, senior director of product marketing from Impinj.  “In tests with our near-field antennas and Speedway® Revolution readers, we measured superior read performance on a variety of materials, which we attribute to the combination of Avery Dennison’s advanced antenna design capability and the industry-leading read sensitivity of the Monza 5 chip.”

Samples of the AD-110m5 are available now with production quantities available in Q1, 2012.

Warmkraft Boosts Fulfillment Efficiency With RFID

USAF Uniform Tags with Avery Dennison RFID AD-223 Inlay

The military uniform finisher is using Avery Dennison’s AD-223 EPC Gen 2 tags to reduce mispacks by 96 percent, and has cut shipping-related labor costs in half thanks to technology provided by SimplyRFID.

By Claire Swedberg, RFID Journal Nov. 10, 2011

Warmkraft, a Mississippi company that applies finishes to military uniforms, has reduced its manual shipping labor costs by 50 percent, while lowering its shipping–error rate down to 0.2 percent from 5 percent, by RFID-tagging its products at the item level after those goods are treated, and by then reading the tags prior to shipment. The system, provided by RFID technology firm, enables the finishing company to ensure that the correct products are packed in cartons and shipped to the military per each order, and also to send advance shipping notices and receive payment two weeks earlier than was possible without RFID.

Warmkraft began tagging its products destined for the U.S. Air Force USAF) in November 2009, as required by the military agency, and has now expanded the system to its two Mississippi facilities at which uniforms are treated prior to being shipped to the Air Force—as well as, now, the U.S. Marine Corps. The USAF’s item-level RFID deployment was intended to help the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency track the receipt and issuance of uniforms at Lackland Air Force Base’s recruit training center USAF Boot Camp Tracks Boots. Over the next year, says Ron Lack, Warmkraft’s general manager, the company also plans to begin tagging uniforms destined for the U.S. Army.

The U.S. military receives uniforms from Warmkraft after the finishing company provides chemical treatments that include insect repellant, waterproofing and wrinkle proofing. Warmkraft receives uniforms from garment manufacturers, applies the appropriate chemical treatments, and ships the finished clothing to recruiting centers, where they can then be issued to soldiers. Prior to installing RFID, the firm depended on manual inspections to verify which uniforms were packed in which boxes, and to ensure that no mistakes were made before those cartons were shipped to fill military orders. In addition, regular audits were conducted on boxes just prior to their loading onto trucks, and if any errors were discovered in any of the audited cartons, the entire order would need to be manually inspected for additional errors before it could be transported. Ensuring that the proper items could be accounted for is especially important, Lack says, because the garments belonged to the supplier, and not to Warmkraft.

“We process the goods,” he states. “We don’t own them. If they send us 1,000 garments, we have to account for 1,000 garments.”

Since Warmkraft was applying RFID tags for the USAF, the company chose to gain as much advantage from the  technology as it could. Lack says his firm received installation assistance from one RFID company at its Taylorsville site. Then, when Warmkraft was ready to increase its tag-read speed on a conveyor system, as well as expand the solution’s use to its second, larger site at Stonewall, it contracted for installation services and software from SimplyRFID. The first solution included RFID tags, readers and an Internet-based software system in which information was stored on a server hosted by the systems integrator. However, Lack notes, there were several shortcomings with this solution. For one thing, he explains, there were problems with reading the tags specific to the box being packed, and with ensuring that other tags in the vicinity (stray reads) were not captured by the system. What’s more, he adds, the Web-based server was a concern, since a failure in Internet connection could potentially shut the RFID system down.

SimplyRFID provided its Nox software that resides on site and manages data locally, without requiring an Internet connection, says Carl Brown, SimplyRFID’s president. In addition, the firm was able to program the software to detect whether a tag was, in fact, attached to a garment being packed and shipped, as opposed to a stray read. It accomplished this by requiring two reads of the same tag within a specified amount of time (from two successive readers on the conveyor), which would indicate that the tag was moving down the conveyor, and not, for example, simply sitting on a nearby table.

With the RFID system, Warmkraft’s employees attach Avery Dennison AD-223 RFID tags to garments or their packaging after they have been processed and are ready for shipment. The company utilizes Zebra Technologies R110Xi printer-encoders to print the ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) passive labels. The Nox software stores the tag ID numbers of all tags, along with the stock-keeping unit (SKU) of the garments to which they were attached. The uniforms are then packed in boxes and stored within the warehouse for anywhere from one day to a month, while awaiting an order from the military. Once such an order arrives, cartons are removed from storage and placed onto a conveyor that moves the boxed items through two portals constructed using ThingMagic Astra readers. As each item’s tag is read by both portals, the Nox software determines that it is, in fact, a valid tag (and not a stray read), and compares the ID number to ensure that it matches a specific order’s SKU. If the software determines that all tag IDs match the order, a Zebra printer encodes and prints another RFID label that is then attached to the carton and is married to the ID numbers of all goods packed within that box. In the event of a discrepancy, however, a different, non-RFID label, marked “Exception,” is printed using a Zebra 105SL printer, and is then placed on the box, flagging staff members to remove that carton from the order and rectify the problem before moving it back through the RFID system.

By Mark Roberti

Oct. 3, 2011—A growing number of businesses are beginning to understand how an RFID system can improve efficiencies and reduce costs, which is especially critical during these challenging economic times. Most are deploying the technology to solve a particular business problem.

Read more…http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/8832/1/2/

By Claire Swedberg, RFID Journal

Aug. 12, 2011—More than a year after its launch, the Brazilian Army’s RFID Adoption Program has improved its process for receiving Class II products, consisting of such items as uniforms, tents, helmets and boots. The system was provided and installed by RFID solutions firm Seal Technology, at the Army’s 21st Supply Warehouse, located in São Paulo, with assistance from GS1 Brazil, which provided the Electronic Product Code (EPC) numbers and consulting services.
Suppliers are tagging products with EPC Gen 2 ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) tags provided by Avery Dennison, RR Donnelley Labels and Saint Paul RFID. When tagged items are unloaded from trucks at the logistics center, by means of forklifts and pallet jacks, the tags are read while passing through an RFID portal, thereby indicating that those goods were received. Each item (such as a pair of boots), as well as every carton in which multiple supplies are packed, has an EPC Gen 2 passive tag adhered to it, encoded with a unique ID number. The items’ tag IDs are married to the ID of the specific carton in which they are packed.
 

Read the whole article at http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/8696/1