HID Connects S2E7: RFID Logistics and Supply Chain. Is the Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts?
Welcome to HID Connects! HID Connects is a podcast designed to bring you the latest news and trends in the security space. Our goal is to not only equip you with information and best practices, but to also open new conversations on topics shaping our industry.
Some types of technology touch our lives almost every day and RFID is one of them. In a world where margins are thin and the global supply chain is wide, this episode will touch on what RFID means to our supply chain, what benefits this technology provides, and even some cool use cases.
Joining us to walk us through RFID and Supply Chain are Brad Williams, Segment Director of IoT Services at HID as well as David Chose, IDT Sales Manager, Americas for HID. Together, we’ll answer the question, “RFID, Logistics, and Supply Chain…Is the Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts?”
Take a minute to listen below. And while you’re at it, be sure to subscribe to receive future episodes.
Here is a transcript if you’d like to read along:
Matt Winn
Hello, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever time it is and wherever in the world you may be. My name is Matt Winn, your podcast host and resident secure identities nerd. Welcome to yet another episode of HID Connects. Today we're going to focus on a very specific type of technology that has a very big impact on our daily lives, and that is RFID and logistics, particularly around supply chain.
Now, in a world where margins are thin and the global supply chain is very wide, this episode will touch on what RFID means to our supply chain, what benefits the technology provides, and we'll even touch on some cool use cases. To help walk us through these topics, I'm excited to be joined in the studio by two fellow nerds.
First, to my right, we have Brad Williams, Segment Director of IoT Services Industrial at HID, as well as David Chose, IDT Sales Director, Americas for HID. So, gentlemen, thank you both for joining us. Let's start with introductions. So, Brad, thank you for coming in to HID headquarters in Austin. Tell our guests a little about yourself. How did you get involved in the business?
Brad Williams
Yeah, sure. So, my story goes back to growing up in the Detroit area. And like many people who grow up in Detroit, I was involved in the automotive business through my father, which took me through a journey of learning how to follow and understand the manufacturing process. That journey took me into selling different types of equipment. And then ultimately, for the last 15 years, I've been focused on HID’s tools, technology and helping to digitize workflows and really just help companies fix problems with digital technologies.
Matt Winn
Very nice. Well, thank you for bringing your expertise to the panel today. Appreciate it that. All right. And David, thanks to you for joining us as well. Same question to you. Introduce yourself and how did you get here?
David Chose
David Chose, the HID Sales Director for America's RFID. I fell into RFID, graduated from the University of Washington with an electrical engineering degree and went into sales directly afterwards instead of engineering. Got right into RFID in 1999. Done nothing but RFID since college. And I've been with HID 14 years now.
Matt Winn
Excellent. Well, glad that it brought you both to the podcast table today. Thank you both, again for joining us. All right, family. So now that you know our guests, let's dive directly into this episode's burning question, and that is RFID logistics and supply chain. Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? All right, gentlemen, let's start with the basics, and we'll start, David, with you. Can you explain a bit from the true fundamental level? What is RFID technology? What does RFID stand for and what are the different components in your side of the world?
David Chose
Sure, RFID is radio frequency identification, and the easy way to think about it is a wireless barcode. So, with a wireless barcode, you do not need the line of sight. You can read what's inside of a box and you can read the entire box. You can read hundreds of RFID tags in a second. You have memory on each RFID tag, which can be dynamic.
Unlike a barcode, you can change what's written to these tags on the fly as it goes through your supply chain, if that's necessary. And now one of the recent additions is the ability to add sensors. So now we can detect passively again, this is no battery. You can detect temperature, humidity, light in the stream. We're getting more and more use cases of that, too.
Matt Winn
Very exciting. And now Brad, from your lens, you come from a different side of the house, so to speak. Explain what you're working on a bit more and then same question to you. Explain the basics of RFID from your perspective.
Brad Williams
Yeah, sure. So I'm glad we started with the electrical engineer first. That's always good with radio frequency.
Matt Winn
I'm a comms guy, so I have no idea. You're good.
Brad Williams
I'm the process. Yes. So, a main difference, as David alluded to, is with active technology, which is the technology that our business segment focuses on that has a battery on board and one of the ways to distinguish what it does is that a passive RFID tag, dormant or passive RFID tag, is not going to communicate anything. It's not going to broadcast anything until it goes through a portal or a fixed type reader or a scanner is placed near it, which energizes that RFID tag and then brings that information back digitally over the air.
That information, that is on the tag in the active world, is constantly transmitting a signal. And even though the technology that HID offers through IoT services, we are, at the moment right now, for the most part, we're infrastructure dependent. With a battery, you can read a farther distance, you can get more granularity than with passive tags where you're going through chokepoints, and then it kind of maps into a number of different use cases that you can do because we are not just watching something as and I shouldn't say we, but with passive, you're monitoring something or reading something.
It's a pretty fixed area that you're doing it within. With active RFID, you can start now to identify assets and people and how they move through manufacturing environments. And now your processes become visible. And with that is a lot of safety efficiency and optimization, and really data and benefits that companies can experience with it.
Matt Winn
Very good, we’ll delve into those use cases later. Thank you all for describing the difference. As a human, I identify more as passive, I would say, but that's because I'm lazy. But let's go back. So now the focus on the episode is around logistics and supply chain. So, Dave, let's start with you. Let's talk about the value of RFID here. So where does RFID and supply chain intersect? And for the layperson, why should people care?
David Chose
Well, the value starts at the very beginning. The farther you can push it up the chain, the more value you're going to squeeze out of RFID. So, I like to take it all the way back to the factory level where the manufacturing is happening. It intersects as far up the chain as you can push it.
Matt Winn
Okay. And where would that start? Give me a couple of examples of where you might see that come into place.
David Chose
One example, as you're building something, you're either embedding that RFID into the said product or you're adding a tag to the packaging. You can see up at the manufacturing level with a badge, you can log into a workstation. So, you know the employee, you know the exact product they're working on, you know their efficiencies throughputs on different models or whatnot.
You have this visibility on this individual person at the factory that goes to QA. QA is now saying, you know, we have more failures with station three, shift two. That's David, you know, he needs training where something's going wrong there so we can reinforce training and correct a lot of the mistakes right there.
You're not even tracking and tracing, you know, dock door and logistics and inventory at that point, you're just doing factory efficiencies and whatnot. So, there is a lot of value you can squeeze out of RFID without even going into the supply chain use case.
Matt Winn
So, lots of data insights and kind of identifying some of the outliers that you might want to address. Okay. Excellent. Same question to you. Where does the value come from? Where does RFID and industrial intersect and why should people care?
Brad Williams
Yeah, so one trend that we're seeing on the industrial side is companies are starting to use location to understand where their employees are. And there's an enormous amount of benefit for that. It's not about tracking an employee to understand if an employee is where they're supposed to be. But in the world of safety and some of the threats that we're facing as a society now, should there be, you know, a fire or a tornado and there's an evacuation that needs to happen, as an example, wherein HID is very good at access control, once you're past that door and that badge lets you in the building, that access control technology cannot tell you where that person is in the building, right? Our location technology can do that. Why would that be important? Well, if we're here today and there's a fire, there's an evacuation that needs to happen, that badge that we have location technology on can tell first responders whether I'm still here in the building or if I'm out in an assembly area and I'm safe. The appetite for that is getting a lot larger in industrial.
And, it's nice to see the safety element to that because all of us, you know, all companies work on budgets and you can't really put a dollar value on anybody's safety or anybody's life. So having that benefit when, you're deploying our type of technology that you can use it for production efficiency, you can use it in the warehouse to track forklifts — that's where we're going to intersect with passive RFID. But at the same time, with the same infrastructure that you need to put up already, you can understand where your people are and know if they're safe.
Matt Winn
Excellent. That's a cool use case. I want to dive deeper into more of those. So, starting with you on the industrial side, you mentioned your experience on the automotive landscape. Let's talk more about this technology and how it could directly impact the automotive industry. What are some of the examples you see there and what insights do you want to offer?
Brad Williams
We could probably spend the rest of the day talking about that here. Yeah, in the automotive industry, there are a lot of really great RFID applications that I've seen. There's a number of different methodologies within RFID, especially within active: you have Bluetooth technology, you have Wi-Fi, you have GPS, all of them have their strong suit, and there's no one best sensing technology for every application in an automotive facility.
But I've seen technologies and RFID technologies that are so advanced that they can monitor a person going on to a manufacturing line. And with the complexity of manufacturing, especially in the automotive industry, where you have now one line that may have 10 or 15 different variants of vehicles being produced on it, where they're not necessarily being produced in a batch. So, you're doing the same vehicle, you know, for the first half of the day, you're getting vehicles that are, you know, different models. You may be getting a truck. You know, they have the same chassis, but now you have a car coming down and they require different tools. And there are RFID technologies out there that are accurate enough and have low enough latency where they can intersect with one of those tool controllers. And if somebody has taken an incorrect tool to a car, they can shut that down in real time. That’s one of the more interesting applications I've seen in the auto industry. But then you have to think about, like in the world of logistics, when you're inside a factory, there's production logistics. So, there's all kinds of things that are moving and what can we assess by what's moving or what can we assess if something's not where it's supposed to be? We're using location technology to say, “do I have all my parts on the line side? Or if I'm getting low on my parts, where are those parts and am I going to have a line down, a shut down?” You're getting with location technologies in a plant like that, the situational awareness it brings from bringing visibility to the work processes where you can move from visibility to monitoring and then you can move from monitoring to taking action and getting out of quality escapement, flushing waste out of the process, understand where parts are relative to a manufacturing process.
Matt Winn
Good efficiency abounds.
David Chose
There's one more automotive use case that I'd like to discuss going back to the traceability of RFID. If you're putting critical infrastructure into a car and you have traceability all the way back to the exact line that that was built on in the case of a recall, you're now not going back and saying everything that came out of this factory or this lot or this month, you know, needs to be recalled. Now we're recalling 200,000 vehicles. No, we can recall exactly what came out of that single line, which would initiate a recall quicker. The decision would be made faster. And you can actually save lives that way.
Matt Winn
Yeah, absolutely. Very nice. Let's stick with the use cases. I also want to talk about inventory and asset management, because that's a really key one as we go across the supply chain, including at the beginning to your previous point. So how does RFID support inventory and asset management? How does this work and why does it matter?
David Chose
Well, that's a long one. But if we go back to the factory, as you try to quickly go through it, because it's a duplicate, just repeat, rinse and repeat — at the factory order accuracy, traceability as it goes out the dock door, you could read everything on your pallet inside the boxes. So now you can check order accuracy, you can put it on the truck in an optimized way in line with which stops are first on the route. That way the delivery driver is not taking pallets off to get to pallets in the back and whatnot. It's mind blowing how many different things are possible. It would take more than one podcast to dive deeply into all the possibilities.
But essentially the most value you're driving out of it is order accuracy, traceability from the factory, now you’ve got time, date, stamp, truck number — as it comes into a DC, again you have receiving time, date, stamp, order accuracy. As they place it in the DC, you know the location inside the DC where that is. For order picking going out of DC you know where it is, you grab it, again scan it going out the dock door, order accuracy. It’s a truck optimization. Once again, it goes to the DC or store level. Again, the same thing at the store level receiving, order accuracy. Now you know what's in the back of the house Now you know what's in the front of the house because at the store level you'll have a handheld scanner and you can “wand around everything” and you can take really fast inventory instead of hitting it with a barcode. You don't have to open up the boxes. You can scan the whole box, just 500 tags a second. Now, if you're looking for a specific item, a customer comes to you and says, “Hey, do you have this pair of jeans in this size, I don't see it out in the front.” You can go around with the scanner, you can plug in the exact unique ID that you want to find and the scanner will be beep, beep, beep. This is a story that's been shared with me at a jean store. What people do, they you might still go to the mall. They find a pair of jeans they want to buy. They're not ready to buy it. They're going to come back to the store and buy it. So take the jeans out of this area and put it over here. So now, essentially, those pair of jeans are disappeared until you do a complete inventory. Now, with a handheld scanner, you can go beep, beep, beep, beep. You can turn the power down. So the read range is less and you can actually see which jeans are out of sequence. You also do this in libraries. People at schools say, “Oh, here's a physics books I don't need. Take it over here, Put it there. I'll remember.” Now that book is gone until you inventory an entire library. Now you can just go down the ones out of sequence and pull it out.
Matt Winn
Fascinating. So, one question for you both, because you all have been in the business for some time now and you've probably worked with just customers upon customers. Looking back, did you really see the potential for RFID being used in this exponential number of use cases? I mean, how did we get here and what's the evolution of this technology?
And, you know, I'm not trying to undermine it by calling it simple technology. But how did such a simple technology have such a huge impact? Whoever wants to take that one first, let's go back in the time machine a little bit and see how this has evolved over the years.
Brad Williams
I'll take that. So, I've been around long enough to have seen the hype cycle of RFID. Fortunately, and many of us can remember when Walmart made very big news that they were going to completely use RFID throughout their entire supply chain. And many companies jumped on that bandwagon. And the first phase, the first go at that with Walmart never really, truly came to fruition.
And some of the reasons behind that is because when anybody gets excited about a technology, you can overflight what a technology can do, and there's limitations to technology. And where we're at today is, this space has evolved so much that we have many different, just in IDT along, we manufacture many different frequencies of passive RFID tags, and there's good use cases for each one of those frequencies.
Same with the active side. There are different types of technologies that map into better use cases. The technologies just evolve so much and companies using them now that, you know, there have been successful deployments and other companies have followed. And you know, certainly on the active side, there's been a lot of benefit in the health care industry. In the healthcare industry, it’s probably one of the, maybe the largest, in terms of active RFID, have adopted it. And HID does some really interesting things in that space with monitoring infants and senior care and staff safety and duress. You know, it's one of the largest things right now in hospitals is nurses and doctors and their safety and their safety from patients.
And we have a technology where a button can be pressed on a badge and that can be routed to security and security can respond. That moves the needle, right? That changes people's just their lives and their jobs. And again, I go back, I think the biggest thing I'll repeat again is we're on we're on the right side now of the hype cycle and people trust the technology and they've seen other companies implement it and be successful with it and they want to adopt it themselves.
Matt Winn
Very good and completely shameless plug. Our season finale is about health care security application, so make sure that you tune in to that too, it'll be a good one. Certainly. Same question. How have you seen things evolve over the years? What's exciting to you?
David Chose
Yeah, when I joined there was only low frequency, and high frequency was kind of the new thing. There wasn’t even UHF back then, but it's the evolution of the products, the need for speed, accuracy, reduced human error, has driven need, from a product side to incorporate RFID. Like we said, in medical, one of our large spaces is incorporating RFID into the medical device itself so that you have a drill, we call it a drill bit, the drill has a reader, the drill bit has the tag. You plug it in, says, I'm authentic, you know, not a gray market. The drug that I'm tipped with is not expired. RPM and torque should be set to this. And I'm a single use item because there's instances where things have been autoclaves and they've reused them, and then you can do a kill switch on it so it can only be used once, or ten times — you can cycle count and then stop it at a certain number. So, it's the individual products that really driven it towards RFID. Also, people don't realize it in their everyday lives, how much they use RFID, your credit card, you're tapping on it, RFID, you're told tag, you're getting into a gate, you're going into work, you're using it every day.
Matt Winn
Very ubiquitous. That's cool.
Brad Williams
Yeah. It makes me think of my toothbrush when it tells me it's time to change the head and the electric toothbrush.
Matt Winn
I didn't realize that was RFID, and I've been ignoring that RFID for about three weeks now, so I need to look into it. But that's very cool. Very cool. All right, so let's flip that question around and let's talk future. So, Dave, let's start with you. What is on the horizon? What's next for RFID and what's exciting you about what's on the horizon?
David Chose
What's exciting to me are the new sensors that are coming out. We never really had sensors like there are today. You know, there was some, but the read range wasn't great, but now they've really done a great engineering on it. As I mentioned earlier, you can now sense, light, temperature, humidity and strain and we are working on some fantastic use cases I cannot discuss publicly, but just like mind blowing, like, wow, I would have never thought of using RFID that way. But that's up and coming. Teaser…. maybe we'll have another podcast.
Matt Winn
Season four or five. We're getting there, we're getting there. All right. Same question. What's going on in the space? What developments are exciting to you?
Brad Williams
Yeah, so again, I would I would say how fast the sensor technologies is changing and evolving. And on the active side, one of the things that we're seeing is I've said a lot that there's there's different sensing technologies that fit certain applications better than others, and certain ones are more expensive than others so you can't scale very large with a very expensive, very accurate solution at times. So, what we're seeing now in the market is system integrators and software providers have software platforms that ingest any type of sensing technology, and now you're getting exponentially valuable where you can take that data, you can unify that data, you can share that data to existing business systems when and how and where they need it. And there's just endless possibilities when you can unify all that data coming in, as David mentioned.
We do some things right now with advanced condition monitoring where we use a three-axis accelerometer and we use AI and machine learning in the cloud to understand how a pump or a motor is rotating the bearing of the spindle. And we can detect when something changes, to let facilities know that that machine needs to be inspected. And in a lot of cases, we help them get out ahead of a shutdown. Lots of value.
David Chose
Is it reminding me of one thing, it is like through that supply chain example I gave, having AI look at all of that instead of humans setting par levels for different regions and whatnot, what AI is going to be able to learn and do predictive. You know, just in time inventory was a bad word a couple of years ago, but now we're getting back to that and we can see the trend going to, no one wants to hold inventory anymore. We're finally getting back to that type of supply chain. And AI with the visibility RFID provides, could be very interesting.
Matt Winn
Absolutely. The future is now. Okay, cool. Anything else that we should talk through related to RFID in the supply chain? Any closing thoughts or anything else that you want to mention or add into the discussion today?
Brad Williams
The only thing I'll add from a from a human perspective is one of the things that that I've seen that I think people can relate to is, if I'm a worker in a warehouse and I know and I'm commissioned to go and pick up a pallet of parts and I know a forklift needs to be used to do that, I may not know where a forklift is. Well, today with technology, I can open my phone, I can see where the nearest forklift is for me. I can get on that forklift. I can use RFID to tell that forklift, “Yes, I'm trained, I can drive this forklift. So turn on.” And then that forklift can tell me where the items are that I need to go and get.
Now, if you didn't have that type of visibility, think of the frustration of somebody who has to go and pick and get parts for the forklift doing that time and time and time again. And for me, when we deploy these type of these technologies, and I've been involved in them, you know, there's always reservation, you know, for adoption from employees and skepticism about new technology. But once they get that in their hands and they see that and it creates a different work experience, that's pretty exciting to deliver.
Matt Winn
Very nice. Same question to you. Anything else that we should have covered that I didn't ask you?
David Chose
No, I'm good.
Matt Winn:
All right, very good. Well, in that case, let's answer today's burning question, which, as always, is the title of the episode. And really as it relates to impact, when it comes to RFID logistics and the supply chain, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts. David, what would your answer to that question.
David Chose:
The whole greater than sum? I would say so, yeah. I mean, the value you can derive from RFID is incredible. And for the amount of cost, which is pennies, driving that kind of value and squeezing it all out. And there's use cases we haven't discussed, and use cased I don’t even know about, you know, it's just a no brainer.
Matt Winn:
Yeah. Opportunities seem endless. Same question.
Brad Williams:
Yeah. I would agree that the sum is greater than the parts. You know, at the end, what RFID is doing is it's providing data. And so, one of the things that that previous manager said to me that I never forgot is, “When you're digitizing something, it's not a one-time event.” So, customers need to commit to this technology and it's a journey that they go on. And so it's, you know, one building block at a time. And as you get that entire supply chain and you put RFID where you can and you're realizing the benefits of what that brings, that takes a while to get there, right? And I think we're just at the beginning of seeing where this is, where this all is going to head in the next ten years.
Matt Winn:
Very exciting. And knowledge is power. And we're just at the beginning. Very excellent. Thank you both for your time. Really appreciate your insights and the listeners do as well. Thank you both for taking time out of your schedules to join us and looking forward to having y'all back. Season four or five. You got that teaser in there, so you got your spot back, so that's great, that's great.
All right. Well, again, thanks to our experts, Brad, David, for sharing your expertise and perspective on the topic. As always, it’s been a true pleasure and we greatly appreciate your time.
Of course, even bigger: thanks to you, our listeners, for joining us for this episode and throughout this season so far. We truly do enjoy creating this podcast and hope that you equally enjoy listening. I look forward to seeing you soon for another episode, speaking of which, did you know that we publish the video versions of these podcasts on our YouTube channel? Be sure that you check out the visuals so you can see our glowing faces on HID’s YouTube channel. And if you like what you hear, be the first to know when new episodes are published by subscribing to HID Connects. Doing so will ensure that you stay connected to us. And of course, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, be sure to rate and review this podcast. You can also subscribe to us, like I mentioned on YouTube and be sure to check out all of our social channels.
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