We wanted to follow up on the topic of resourcing as it is again profiled in the news, specifically receiving special attention in Monday’s (August 24, 2009) edition of the Wall Street Journal, which covered a story on Farouk Systems plans to move manufacturing back to the United States from China. Farouk produces grooming appliances, [...]

The August 2009 edition of RFID Monthly is now available. In this edition of the newsletter, we cover several new industry developments, including the following:
General Market Comment; Seeing Improved Signs. We are seeing increased signs that RFID projects are again moving forward after experiencing a delay related to economic concerns. Our broader data capture survey data [...]

Asia appears to be showing encouraging signs of improvement, most notably in China, Japan and Korea. We view these as important RFID markets and hear of some increased RFID activity. Of the companies we cover, we are seeing Asian inventory levels that have bottomed with some modest restocking, particularly in electronic components. Chinese stimulus appears [...]

The Jackson Health System, located in Miami, announced the expansion of its ZigBee based real-time locating system beyond Jackson Memorial Hospital to Jackson North Medical Center and (382 bed acute care) Jackson South Community Hospital (199 bed acute care) and provided some insight on benefits received to date. The system has been live at Jackson [...]

Impinj announced it is supplying Coke with Indy based reader chips and Monza tag chips in association with the new FreeStyle fountain dispenser product, which now tells us that Coke is using UHF.
The product, which offers up to 100 product choices, will serve the fast food restaurant, convenience store and movie theatre markets. Recall, as [...]

Impinj announced availability of its Speedway Revolution fixed reader product, which offers a reduced price point, has easier installation features and enables more automated operation. The revolution product has a $1,385 list price for a two-port model and $1,585 list price for a four-port model; these prices represent roughly a 20% discount to the list [...]

The Health Industry Business Communications Council announced ANSI / HIBC 4.0, a standard based on HF that is designed for product tagging for healthcare suppliers. The standard illustrates use of RFID within the existing HIBCC Supplier Labeling Standard where bar coding does not satisfy a company’s requirement. A recent HIBCC pre-release seeks to promote the [...]

The Universal Postal Union (UPU) announced that 21 member country posts began using a Gen 2-based system to enable performance measurement as part of the UPU’s Global Monitoring System (GMS). Phase I includes 24,000 RFID enabled test letters that will be sent by 530 independent “panelists” that originate in 38 countries. The test letters will [...]

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a case brought by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund to enjoin enforcement of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in the State of Michigan. The plaintiffs in the case are individual farmers that raise livestock and believed that forced use of the NAIS is a [...]

BMW has installed a real-time locating system at its assembly plant in Regensburg to reduce labor associated with bar code scanning and to reduce production mistakes. The Tool Assistance System requires each vehicle assembly to be fitted with an ultra-wide band (UWB) tag. As the vehicle assembly platform moves down the production line, exact 3D [...]