RFID in the Cold Chain

With the introduction of more easily deployable infrastructure systems, RFID is used to monitor the stock levels, safety, and security of refrigerated items in remote locations.

By John Beans

One of the distinctive characteristics of RFID technology is its ability to sense the presence and movement of products and assets without requiring and (perhaps more importantly) relying on human assistance. No situation highlights the value of this aspect of RFID more dramatically than deployment across many remote sites; especially if those sites are customer sites.

Remote sensing: a competitive weapon for suppliers

The trend of manufacturers and distributors taking a more value-added consignment relationship with their customers is not new. But we are now seeing sensing technology used to truly eliminate cost and uncertainty from the supply chain, rather than merely shifting it from a customer to a supplier. Unless cost is truly removed, the customer will end up (one way or another) paying for it anyway.

One of the most important guarantees that a supplier can provide is that the customer will not run short of an item. The obvious approaches to ensuring this involve frequent inventory counts and/or excess inventory. However, both of these solutions are prohibitively expensive for a supplier with hundreds or thousands of customer locations to monitor.

A better approach, recently made practical, is to put in place real-time electronic monitoring at each remote location. This dramatically reduces the ongoing cost of inventory counts and can scale to cover many locations more economically than manual methods. Greatly improved information velocity allows a supplier to detect and react to unexpected surges (and drops) in demand and to balance inventory across locations as needed. As the customer consumes an item, the supplier is immediately notified.

Case-in-point: specialty drug supplies to hospitals

ASD Healthcare, a division of AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group, deploys RFID as a core part of its Cubixx ™ service offering. Already in use at more than 75 hospitals in the U.S., ASD uses RFID-equipped medical refrigerators and RFID-tagged products to detect immediately when the specialty drugs that it supplies are taken from inventory at each customer location. Since these are temperature-sensitive items, ASD also monitors the temperature conditions at each location to ensure that items are maintained in optimal condition.

It would be difficult or impossible to deploy this service widely if each customer location required extensive installation and ongoing maintenance. A key part of ASD's solution is a set of small embedded appliances from Blue Vector that automatically control the sensors within each refrigerator and manage network communication issues so that raw RFID and temperature signals are appropriately interpreted and reliably communicated back to ASD's order and fulfillment systems. This is a non-trivial challenge in light of the widely varying condition of hospital networks around the country.

What will it be used for next?

With the capability to quickly and economically deploy RFID, temperature sensing, and other types of sensing across many remote locations, we are likely to see the emergence of new services and service levels that have not been practical before. In the near future, we will want every inventory item in the cold chain to be "online" and monitored continuously—even when they are in transit between locations. The technology is ready today.

John Beans is the Vice President of Marketing for Blue Vector Systems. Contact him at john@bluevector.com.