CHEP will begin tracking 250,000 pallets with RFID at a Florida pooling center and with select customers and service centers in a major pilot scheduled to run from February through June. The pilot itself will be one of the highest-volume logistics applications for RFID, even though it will identify less than 2% of CHEP's pallets. CHEP, the world's largest pallet and container pooling company, manages more than 160 million pallets and 35 million returnable containers for more than 250,000 clients worldwide.
"The initiative represents a major milestone toward the adoption of RFID as a tracking technology throughout the supply chain," said Edwin Birnbaum, an international vice president at CHEP who heads the company's asset tracking program.
CHEP plans to track pallets wirelessly in real time as they enter and leave company facilities and make the data available over the Internet so clients can have total visibility of their shipments. Later the pallets may be tracked elsewhere in the supply chain, including at customer's distribution centers, according to Andy Robson, business development manager in CHEP's Supply Chain Information Services division.
CHEP contracted Intermec Technologies, Savi Technology and Marconi InfoChain to provide RFID tags, logistics software and integration services, respectively. Intermec's 915MHz Intellitags, designed for compatibility with the proposed GTAG standard, are being embedded into plastic leaderboards used in place of wooden leaderboards used in standard pallet construction. Two tagged plastic leaderboards, costing $1 each, will be used for each pallet in the program. The technology vendors are not subsidizing the system cost, as is sometimes the case in pilot projects. "That price point works for us and for our business model," said Robson.
See the January issue of Frontline Solutions for an expanded story on CHEP's program, the company's technology evaluation process and the potential impact on RFID supply chain standards.
