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U.S. Military Clarifies RFID
Mandate
The Department of Defense provides more information
about its plans to require all its suppliers to use RFID tags starting in
2005.
RFID Journal
Oct. 10, 2003
Like Wal-Mart, the U.S. Department of Defense is still working
through many of the details of how it will deploy RFID technology. But in an
interview with RFID Journal, Maurice Stewart, the deputy chief of the DOD
Logistics AIT Office, provided more information about the DOD's plans to require
all suppliers to put RFID tags on shipments beginning in 2005.
The DOD began looking at RFID as a way to improve logistics
after the Gulf War, and it has been using active RFID tags from Savi Technology to track freight
containers since 1995. It became a sponsor of the Auto-ID Center in 2000 because
it wanted to work with technology vendors and industry partners to develop the
Electronic Product Code as a low-cost way to track goods moving through the
global suppy chain. Stewart says the DOD wanted to use the same RFID technology
in its supply chain "to take maximum advantage of all the inherent asset
management efficiencies that can be gained from automatic data
collection."
The U.S. Acting Under Secretary of Defense, Michael W. Wynne,
sent a memo on Oct. 2 to senior military officials announcing an ambitious plan
to require suppliers to use active and passive RFID tags on shipments to the
military by January 2005 (see Military Edict: Use
RFID by 2005). The memo states that "the DOD will be an early adopter of
innovative RFID technology that leverages the Electronic Product Code (EPC) and
compatible tags." However, it also says: "DOD will embrace the use of commercial
documentation standards (ISO standards), which will facilitate our partnership
with industry and expedite efficiencies that will benefit both
enterprises."
Since the Auto-ID Center's EPC technology and ISO standards for
RFID are not compatible, the memo is unclear about how these different RFID
technologies will be used. In addition, the DOD has its own identification
numbering scheme, called Unique Identification (UID). "What the memorandum
states is that we will leverage what industry is doing with EPC," says Stewart.
"But the basic standard of the DOD is the ISO standard."
The military's UID is a numbering scheme that identifies the
manufacturer of the item, the product category and the unique item. The
structure is similar to EPC and the two could be compatible. For instance, EPC
tags could have a header that tells computers that the number that follows is a
UID code. The tags could communicate with readers based on global standards that
ISO is developing for RFID.
"We feel that EPC might be compatible with UID, but we haven't
explored it to that point yet," says Stewart. "We have had conversations with
EPCglobal and the Auto-ID Center to try to work our way through parallels
between EPC and UID."
The DOD will hold meetings on Oct. 22 and Oct. 23 to educate all
of its units about the technology standards and business applications of RFID.
Stewart expects that the meetings will provide a forum to begin to work through
some of the issues surrounding EPC, UID and ISO standards. In January, the DOD
will hold an RFID Summit to solicit feedback from suppliers. It will complete
its analysis of the initial RFID projects by May 2004 and provide a final RFID
policy and implementation strategy by June 2004.
However, the DOD does not expect every supplier to tag every
pallet and case starting in January 2005. Instead, the DOD plans to change its
rules surrounding the acquisition of materials and supplies to require any
company that is renewing a contract or signing a new contract to put RFID tags
on pallets and cases, and eventually individual parts. "Any time you are going
to disrupt the process of technology, it is going to require some phasing in,"
says Stewart. "What we will try to do is implement it as quickly as possible
through our contracts."
The military will have to upgrade its own RFID infrastructure.
The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) provides more tan 4.6 million different items
for the military, including food, clothing and protective gear, medical supplies
and fuel. DLA also provides 90 percent of the military's construction materials,
such as sandbags and concertina wire, as well as 90 percent of repair parts for
aircraft, tanks and other critical assets. This fiscal year, it will provide
more than $24 billion worth of supplies and services to America's fighting
forces, which means that if it were a business, it would be projected to rank
69th on the Fortune 500.
The DLA is already using a nested scheme where items are scanned
and put in boxes. The data on what's in the box is written to the RFID tag on
the box. The boxes are placed on pallets and the data is written to the pallet
tags. Then the pallets are loaded into a freight container and the data about
the pallets is written to the Savi active tag on the container. DLA uses a
variety of auto-ID technologies to achieve this and will likely continue using
some of these. (For an in-depth case study on how DLA achieves nested
visibility, see (Military Orders RFID Tracking.)
By roughly 2010, all pallets and cases shipped to large depots
run by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) will have to have passive RFID tags.
The military expects to achieve many benefits from using passive RFID technology
on pallets and cases; most of these benefits are the same as those businesses
hope to realize. Better visibility of the materials in the supply chain will
allow it to reduce safety stocks. More accurate and timely data will enable it
to better forecast consumption of supplies, so it can buy only what it needs and
make sure the supplies arrive where and when they are needed.
By enabling data to be captured without manual scanning, the DOD
expects to reduce the number of people needed to handle goods and redeploy those
people to more critical tasks. Better visibility and new security tags should
make it possible to reduce the number of items that are lost or stolen while in
transit.
The big question is: Will the DOD's suppliers comply with the
plan? "I think we'll get cooperation from industry," says Stewart. "Suppliers
can not afford not to implement this technology. It's just like when industry
adopted the bar code. You couldn't continue doing business with a pencil and
paper. They have to implement RFID, and we have to implement it."
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