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."
