On the leading edge of RFID

The worldwide leader in razor blades says radio frequency identification will keep it a cut above the competition.

"We call it perfect retail," says Jamshed Dubash, Gillette's director of auto-ID technology. "It's having the right product at the right place at the right time."

Of course, it's still a dream at this point. Being able to track individual consumer packaged goods is still years away, held at bay by adolescent technology and high costs. But for Gillette, tracking cases of razor blades from distribution center to retail receiving docks soon will move from pilot phase to limited-scope reality.

Even at the case level, the financial benefits are enormous. Discrepancies between invoices and actual inventory received by a retailer can be eliminated. Human miscounts won't occur. Pallets of merchandise will no longer get lost in cavernous warehouses. With implementation of RFID by trucking companies, tracking inventory throughout the supply chain and minimizing theft of in-transit goods becomes possible.

"Eventually we'll have a new level of transparency," says Paul Fox, Gillette's director of global external relations. "We won't see quite end to end, but we'll see from our manufacturing floor into the retailer's back room."

Gillette is moving with care, figuring out the best place to affix tags, maximizing read rates, getting multiple vendors to work together and modifying systems to leverage the collected data.

It's slow going and a far different scenario than the one envisioned by RFID proponents who were fired up by reports that Gillette had ordered 500 million tags from Alien Technology in January 2003.

"Our agreement with Alien gave us the option to purchase up to half-billion tags," Fox says. "We have not done this."

Alien spokesman Tom Pounds concurs: "I can tell you that Gillette has taken delivery of more than 20,000 tags; they have not moved too far into the larger commitment."

On board early

But Gillette has long been committed to RFID hardware technology and the electronic product code (EPC) data - an electronic bar code - that each tiny tag carries. In 1999, the company was a founding member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Auto-ID Center, an academic research effort that laid the technical groundwork for today's products.

By establishing its participation early on, Gillette became a key player and now is working with major retailers, including Wal-Mart and the U.K.'s Tesco, to develop standards and agreements on how data and processes are shared. By viewing its own distribution center and IT capabilities as a set of small, reusable Lego block-like modules, Gillette has been able to work with a variety of technology partners, each of which offers expertise in a different area.

"You don't want to get into a situation where one vendor dictates," Dubash says. "If you modularize the interfaces, you should be able to use any vendor at any point in the entire chain."

Gillette's main challenge is to design long-term solutions that are scalable to mass-production levels and that focus on a range of different software and hardware interfaces. "Once you accomplish this, then it doesn't matter which vendor you use," Dubash says.

The company is doing just that. RFID tags from Alien are read by devices from Alien and Tyco Fire & Security's Sensormatic division.

Middleware from Oat Systems integrates with the readers, filtering and aggregating data for use by warehouse management software from Provia. The intent is to create an "appliance," a combination of fundamental electromechanical components (conveyors, shrink-wrap machines) and RFID components (readers and software) that can be deployed quickly and supported by one vendor.