Consortium forms to promote RIFD labelling technology
active RFID-based labelling system which will provide a major boost
to food production logistics and tracking.
A group of technology suppliers, standards bodies and associations, and potential users from a wide variety of industries including the food industry, recently announced the formation of the Smart Active Label (SAL) Consortium to promote smart active label solutions and create standards to benefit supply chain management, asset tracking and the daily lives of consumers.
Smart active labels - defined as thin and flexible data carrying devices that contain a power source and use radio frequency identification (RFID) technology - can remotely monitor, process, store and may also transmit data over extended communications ranges of up to hundreds of metres.
The Consortium was founded on the belief that smart active label systems are a next generation technology, providing customers with complete, real-time inventory visibility and significant improvements in profitability.
"Smart Active Labels will lead the way for the RFID industry to become bigger than the plastic credit card and smart card industry," said Baruch Levanon, the interim chairman of the Consortium. "For me, SAL isn't just RFID labels - it includes printed microelectronics, roll-to-roll mass production of environment-friendly, disposable devices."
The goal of the SAL Consortium is to bring a wide variety of companies and associations together, to better understand the needs of end-users and to serve as basis on which industry-wide partnerships can be built, according to Levanon, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Power Paper, an Israeli provider of thin and flexible micro-power source technology and devices, among other companies.
In addition to creating a collaborative atmosphere between users, technology suppliers, systems integrators and standards bodies, the Consortium plans to develop several active and semi-active modular tag demonstrations, create uniform standards, and publish technical papers and economic analyses of SAL systems under its umbrella.
"The SAL Consortium brings fast resolution and advanced deliverables to a vast pool of solution-hungry users," said John Greaves, the director of RFID at CHEP and a member of the SAL Consortium board.
Following the development of demonstration systems, the Consortium plans to run a series of end-user showcases in Europe and in the United States throughout 2003.
"We're interested in being part of this Consortium because it is a forum to hear about end-user needs and will help us work more closely with them," said Natalie Polack of DuPont Teijin Films. "We recognise SAL as having a large potential for applications worldwide."
"The goals of the Consortium to bring SAL technology to the market more quickly and under an environment of standardisation will help all of the individual companies that are trying to make it happen," according to Dr. William Roberts, a research associate in the Cryovac Division of Sealed Air Corporation. "It is often more than any one company can achieve on its own because of the convergence of so many technologies into single applications."
At the opening event of the Consortium, which was held last week in Slough, UK, other users from airlines to packaging companies discussed their needs for smart active label solutions.
"I believe that there is an opportunity to revolutionise aircraft cold chain management with smart label technology," said Stephen Glass, a food safety and environmental health manager at British Airways.
