RFID Journal announces award winners

RFID Journal has announced the winners of the first RFID Journal Awards. The award winners will be honored at RFID Journal LIVE! 2007, RFID Journal’s fifth annual conference and exhibition, being held April 30 to May 2 in Orlando, Florida.

The winners in the three categories are: Hewlett-Packard Brazil: Best RFID Implementation; DHL: Best Use of RFID in a Service; and Dow AgroSciences: Most Innovative Use of RFID.

The three winners were chosen from among nearly 50 submissions by a panel of six independent judges.
‘We congratulate each of the winners for their outstanding implementations,’ said Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal, and one of the judges. ‘There were many great submissions, and all of the judges found choosing only one winner in each category very difficult. It’s a testament to how far RFID has come in the past few years that there are so many projects creating real business value today.’

Marcelo Pandini, manager, RFID & business development at Hewlett-Packard Brazil, will describe how HP uses RFID at its Sao Paolo plant to track the manufacturing and shipping of printers. More than 65 readers are installed at the site. More than 40,000 reads and writes take place on printers every day, with a read/write yield of more than 99.5 per cent. HP will explain how the data is used to drive real business value today.

Dr Keith Ulrich, head of Deutsche Post world net’s technology and innovation management (TIM) group, will explain how his team formulated a plan to help DHL, a Deutsche Post subsidiary, use RFID technology to track the temperature of shipments at various points from departure to arrival. The goal was to create a solution that would enable DHL and its customer to track shipment conditions in real time using RFID tags within shipping containers and readers located at critical stages of their shipment.

Andy Wurtz, Sentricon electronics technology leader at Dow AgroSciences, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, will explain how his team developed an RFID system that allows authorized operators of the Sentricon Termite Colony Elimination Systems to scan a station and determine quickly whether there is termite activity. The use of RFID allows authorized operators to scan and pass by a station without termites, instead of having to stop at each station and perform a manual inspection.

‘Bringing three top-quality case studies together in one general session is unprecedented,’ said Roberti. ‘This will truly be a unique experience and a unique opportunity for end users to see just how much can be achieved with RFID technologies.’