Alien Appoints New Vice President of Marketing
Alien Technology has announced a new Vice President of Marketing and Industry Relations, Ronny Haraldsvik, who has 17 years of global strategic marketing and industry experience under his belt.
Haraldsvik has background in markets such as wireless and wireline networking and IP services, personal computing, wafer fabrication, software, and consumer devices. He joins Alien Technology from QUALCOMM where he held positions as vice president of strategy and market development, and vice president of marketing for mobile broadband. Previously, Haraldsvik was vice president of marketing at Flarion Technologies, which was acquired by QUALCOMM, where he led all marketing efforts in support of industry awareness for Flarion and the introduction of its FLASH-OFDM technology. He was also vice president of marketing with Nortel Network's Shasta IP Services business unit, and director of field marketing while with Bay Networks prior to Nortel's acquisition. Now he will lead the market strategy, product marketing, new market development, business partners, and industry relations functions at Alien Technology.
"Haraldsvik has an exceptional background in strategy, global marketing and business development for emerging markets and game-changing technology companies. His expertise in building and expanding these functions worldwide is key as Alien continues to address the growing markets for RFID," said George Everhart, CEO, Alien Technology.
"I am excited to join Alien at an important juncture in the RFID industry, as we accelerate from early adoption to mainstream support for RFID to improve productivity, investment return and business intelligence," said Haraldsvik. "Alien is an RFID innovation leader and with our partners, we will scale this great company to help RFID become and industry-wide success."
Cortegra Builds New Manufacturing Facility
Cortegra Group's subsidiary, Creative Press, will build a 62,000 square foot manufacturing facility in the Vanderburgh Industrial Park in Evansville, IN. Construction on the new facility has already begun, with completion expected by the end of 2007. The project will cost a projected $6 million.
Creative press currently has manufacturing facilities in two other Evansville locations, one of which is being acquired by the State of Indiana for highway reconfiguration plans. The project is being managed by CRESA Partners, a corporate real estate advisory service, and Industrial Contractors, Inc. has been named general contractor.
"We are pleased to reinforce our commitment to our employees and the City by building a new manufacturing facility in Evansville," said Cortegra President, Victor L. Dixon. "Cortegra is recognized for its printing expertise and the high-quality products its building will allow us to further enhance manufacturing and distribution capabilities and remain competitive in the markets we serve."
Cardinal Health to Deploy RFID Technology in California
Cardinal Health has announced that it will integrate RFID technology into the operations of its Sacramento, CA, pharmaceutical distribution center by Fall 2007, to prepare for California's pedigree legislation that will require all drugs distributed within the state to be tracked and traced as they move throughout the supply chain.
This announcement comes just months after Cardinal health shared the results of its RFID pilot program, which was the first end-to-end test of RFID for the healthcare industry, in a real-world setting. Data collected from the pilot confirmed that UHF RFID is a feasible solution to track and trace the possession of pharmaceuticals at the unit, case and pallet levels. It also confirmed that RFID offers significant promise to provide an added layer of safety within the pharmaceutical supply chain by enabling item-level pedigrees to be tracked and traced as they pass from manufacturer to wholesaler to pharmacy.
The recently-passed state legislation in California requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to originate item-level pedigrees for drugs distributed within the state's borders. It also requires companies within the pharmaceutical supply chain to update item-level drug pedigrees upon each change of ownership.
Cardinal Health has said that the healthcare industry as a whole needs to address industry standards and technology issues before an industry-wide adoption of RFID can take place. They've suggested that the supply chain industry first agree on a standards-based approach and a single RFID protocol technology to avoid significant process and cost inefficiencies that would be created without such standards. Cardinal Health also said that technology and process improvements are needed to consistently achieve acceptable read rates at all packaging levels, and that industry acceptance is also needed for standard practices, like accepting barcode technology as a complementary and redundant technology to RFID.
