The Department of Defense and RFID in 2007

A discussion about the Department of Defense's DFARS clause and other timely RFID topics with ADASA's Clarke McAllister

Clarke McAllister, President and Founder of ADASA and advisor to AIM, explains what the DoD's "DFARS clause" is, how it will affect companies tagging for the DoD going into 2007, and an innovative new product that ADASA has released to help solve some of the biggest problems the DOD faces when tagging.

Q. What can suppliers to the DoD expect regarding RFID in 2007?

A. I think the DoD is beginning to achieve realistic expectations in supply chain visibility, allowing reduction in stock levels and decreasing the problem of having repeat orders from the same source, which is often done to ensure delivery of important items. With this visibility in the pipeline, over-ordering is unnecessary. This is what the DoD refers to as "reducing its tail." The "tail" is the baggage carried from one location to another.

In January, a lot of people are going to have to put tags on boxes who didn't have to do it before because the activation date for a lot of these folks associated with the DoD is January 2007. Also, the mandate has expanded exponentially with a big increase in which classes of material need to be tagged. The number of ship points has also been dramatically increased. This is going on now and will continue as contracts are due for renewal. When they do, there is something called a "DFARS clause" serted into them.

Q. What is the DFARS clause and how will it affect suppliers of the DoD? (DFARS stands for Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement.)

It is a military acronym that basically means "RFID requirement." These companies who are renewing their contracts with this DFARS clause will have to start tagging in January of 2007. ADASA is helping people realize that they don't have to go to the trouble of putting on a smart label. The process of adding the tags to the labels and then encoding them has been promoted by the printer company; and the business processes that they support are the ones that have been called "slap-and-ship." It's quick and easy to comply with the mandate, but it is frowned upon by the DoD and Wal-Mart, for sure. They really want people to get more engaged with the technology. And it's also a very costly process.

We're going out to the big consumer packaged goods supplier companies and talking to them about slap-and-ship and their business process costs. Some of the big guys say they can negotiate a really cheap price, but they're stuck with this inefficient process. It's not meshing with the process to go through a warehouse and selectively pull pieces off the shelf to build up an order to go out to Wal-Mart or the DoD. So what ADASA came up with is a business process where we integrate the coding and tagging into the affixing process.

Q. How are on-pitch labels being used and how has ADASA improved handling them?

On-pitch labels are tightly spaced and fairly small—lots of skinny tags on a roll. And we first saw that actually with Wal-Mart a couple of years ago. It's the cheapest way to be compliant with its own mandate—just put an encoded tag on there. So, ADASA has done that, but added one more feature.

The Mobile Tagging Station, or MTS, is the name of the equipment. We have it encode those RFID tags at the point that they are picked in the warehouse. So, you have raw, unprogrammed label stock that you take out into the warehouse and you have your backend middleware system telling the mobile encoder EPC numbers to encode into the tags (individually as each is being demanded). That's unique because it's so small someone can wear it on the body or carry it in hand. It can be mounted on a fork-lift truck. It's very portable. It includes a PAD3500 mobile encoder, a Symbol MC9000 rugged mobile RFID computer and Symbol Wi-Fi access point. All devices are contained in a waterproof industrial case that weighs less than 50 pounds and is small enough to travel as checked baggage on most airlines.

Q. What are some of the biggest problems the DoD faces when tagging, and what solutions does ADASA offer to help with them?

The biggest problems are how to avoid damaging tags and how to tag RF-challenged material. There are lots of liquids, lubricants, etc. that require special care. How do you handle them in a cost-effective way? How do you tag metal parts and tubing? ADASA offers the FAT Tag—Foam Attached Tag—for mounting on metal or containers that carry liquid. They have a foam buffer between the tag and the surface to which they are attached. We can just load a FAT Tag into the MTS and encode it right there on the spot. It's a whole new way you can encode at the point of use for RF-challenged products.

It turns out the DoD actually has to do a lot of tagging itself because its mandate is going out to many companies, but not everyone yet. So not everything coming into their distribution centers (where stuff is then sent out to military bases) is tagged. All of the outbound stuff needs to be tagged, but only some of the inbound stuff.

We need to teach people how to properly apply tags that come off of printers without damaging them. An ISO document generated by the AIM RFID Experts Group teaches people how to properly peel tags so as to not damage the tags with mechanical stress. We also need to teach people how to be careful of electrostatic discharge. It's everywhere, especially in a warehouse. It will make for poor performing or completely dead tags—something called a "latent failure."

ADASA designed the MTS to put the tag into a cartridge, just like you'd put ink or toner into a printer cartridge. It relies on the same concept—something that's easy to handle and protects what's inside of it. We protect RFID tags from mechanical stress and electrostatic discharge. It holds 500 tags. We have a refill program as well. We're addressing not only the business process side, but also we're protecting the tag and getting better results from a technical point of view.