Unilever partners with SATO for RFID

SATO, a manufacturer of label and barcode printers and a specialist in data collection systems and RFID, has delivered UHF pallet labeling solutions to several of Metro’s biggest suppliers. Now the German Unilever Group, with headquarters in Hamburg, has also chosen SATO's RFID solutions for their Home & Personal Care (HPC) Business Unit.

Within the framework of this pilot project, Unilever has been tagging pallets with RFID technology and shipping them from their distribution center in Mannheim to Metro’s Cash & Carry central warehouse in Unna, Germany, since March 2005. Unilever's HPC product range is diverse and ranges from liquid detergents and shower gels to spray cans and powders. Each of these products influences the readability of the RFID tag in a different way, due to the composition of the goods, liquids within the product itself or metals used in the packaging.

After several days of intensive testing together with SATO RFID specialists, it became clear that SATO's FlagTagSolutions were the most suitable way to guarantee consistent readability of pallets containing such a multitude of products and materials. What makes this FlagTag (a joint development of SATO and UPM Rafsec) so unique is that after printing the narrow area of the paper label containing the UHF-RFID tag is automatically (or manually) folded along a perforation creating the FlagTag. In this way, the narrow RFID tag with the integrated antenna sticks out perpendicularly from the surface of the pallet – as the word implies, just like a flag. Therefore read and range problems, which occur with flat RFID labels, can be avoided. The FlagTag is encoded and printed on SATO's RFID UHF printer CL 408e. Among the other parties involved in the project besides SATO is Siemens Business Services, who were responsible for integrating the RFID solution into the existing Supply Chain Management system.

Ralph Lffler, RFID project manager at Unilever said, ‘there were two points in SATO's favor: SATO had the necessary technology ‘know-how’, and SATO was very familiar with the specific customer's requirements. The ‘Go Live’ of our RFID Identification for the Metro Cash & Carry markets was in March. Since July, the technology has run very satisfactorily, reaching readability rates between 93 and 100 per cent’.

Lffler also stated: ‘The challenge that the SATO RFID specialists had to face with the pallet labeling was the lack of read range of RFID tags that were applied flatly onto the pallets. In theory, modern RFID-UHF labels have a readability range up to three meters, but extensive practical testing has shown that the actual range is heavily influenced by the content of each pallet. Cans, glass, foil or aluminum packaging, and solid or liquid content – all of these effect the resonance frequency of the RFID tags as well as the reading performance. With flatly applied RFID-UHF labels, one sometimes cannot obtain any read at all. In order to achieve a trouble-free consistent performance of the RFID UHF tags on any and all type of pallets, the SATO RFID specialists have chosen to use the FlagTagSolution for our application.

‘Unilever Germany decided to start a pilot trial with Metro, in order to increase the existing efficiency and growth potential in the area of on-shelf-availability, promotion effectiveness and supply chain efficiency. On the basis of pallet tagging, we already have positive results which make us optimistic about improving the above mentioned business processes permanently.’