Consider, for instance, the Canadian military’s involvement in Afghanistan. It takes a lot of materiel for the military to operate in a war zone and much of it is a tempting target for insurgents either hoping to upgrade their level of armaments or to strike a blow at their enemy. Col. Mike Boomer, chief of operational support, transformation with the Canadian Operational Support Command, which currently uses the technology to track supplies to troops in Afghanistan, says it’s his job to introduce new concepts to the Canadian military leadership and last year’s takeover of NATO troops by Canada resulted in an opportunity to adopt RFID technology for its supply chain.

“In the past, militaries used to rely on the notion that we could predict what we would require and where. We even had tables that would predict what an army, on the move against a robust enemy, would fire in rounds, require so many gallons of fuel and so on,” he says. “Just on the basis of mass, we would fill the pipeline based on those requirements and it worked well when you had huge militaries clashing along a certain area. But it doesn’t work well when you have small, light forces distributed all over the place. We can have a million people out there but they are in small groups spread out (around the world) so the statistics become badly skewed.”

The Canadian forces have what is known as a “closed loop” supply chain that starts in Montréal and ends in Kandahar, Afghanistan that supplies troops with everything from toilet paper to tanks. The concern is about keeping safe what is coming through.

“There are things we have that the opposition would like to get their hands on,” says Boomer. “It (RFID) will help us to detect tampering, in some cases. In fact, some of our systems will become tamper proof. If you try to tamper with it, like prying open a (container) door, the tag will scream. We should be able to program expected routes and, if something deviates, have the system scream back to us here.”

RFID is most common in the retail environment and in that realm, is known as a passive form of the technology. A reader sends out a signal that energizes an antenna on a small tag attached to the item picks up the radio signal and, though conduction, energizes a small chip that reacts to the signal. The tag can be used to track items in the store, including if it is on its way out the door without having been paid for. This is a low-cost version of the technology with the tags costing well under one dollar.

However, other RFID tags can also be active. The tag has a transmitter that sends out information to waiting readers and, because of the price of the tags, is usually reserved for tracking high-value items. And there are combinations of the two. Discussions are also taking place around the addition of sensors that can sense important conditions such as temperature and attempts at tampering.

“RFID and supply chain management probably gets the big part of media attention but it represents a very small amount of today’s RFID deployment,” says Bob Moroz, president of RFID Canada in Markham, Ont.  “There are thousands of applications of RFID that get very little coverage or attention. Some of them are based on identification and some on improved traceability.”

Moroz adds that people in the security industry looking for their opportunities are going to have to understand the technology from the physics side of radio frequencies and the limits on it posed by the environment it is being used in to the business application side.

“It all depends on what you’re trying to do and the worst thing you can do is try to put the technology in front of the solution. Find out the requirements that are needed, build the solution goals and then try and pick the technology that is best suited for that.”

“RFID technology is really nothing new,” says Tony Sabetti, vice-president of RF solutions for Sirit, based in Toronto. “The ability to have a passive tag that can be interrogated by a reader has been around for 20 years. What is new is the harmonization among the manufacturers of that tag to settle on a new protocol and a new frequency: Generation II UHF...today, it’s more like the pipeline theory where it goes in one place and comes out the other. And yes, some infrastructure is there with the companies that have been most proactive. But the idea of getting peeks at the transfers in the middle of the pipeline, that infrastructure is not there. People are looking at implementing it and, as they implement the infrastructure, they get better visibility. And, as they get better visibility, you get better protection of your assets in transit.”

EPCGlobal is an international standards organization that has, over the past few years, been working on setting up a standard for RFID that can be applied internationally.

“EPCGlobal was created, essentially to take what (the Massachusettes Institute of Technology) had invented and commercialize it and generate technology-based solutions, based on industry-user requirements,” says N. Arthur Smith, CEO of EPCGlobal Canada in Toronto, Ont. “To stand back and look at it from a 10,000-foot level, it’s the first ever initiative that has brought together the users — multi-national corporations — and asked them the question: ”˜What business process do you want to drive with this new technology?’

“It’s not technology looking for a solution; it’s users saying ”˜This is the problem we have that I foresee in my supply chain in the future and these are the requirements I need to solve,’” he says.

EPCGlobal is working with over 1,000 companies in an effort to standardize passive and active tags, radio frequency protocols and other issues all relating to the use of the tags.

Although many of the uses of RFID in the past have been considered “closed loop” applications — tracking of parcels by courier companies, airport baggage handling or military shipments, for example  — Sabetti says RFID is a technology finding its way into “open loop” applications such as shipments from supplier to retailer.

“An open loop is something like what a company like Wal-Mart wants to do,” he says. “For example, they want Proctor and Gamble products from manufacturing factories around the world to be routed through Proctor and Gamble distribution centres, then through Wal-Mart distribution channels and eventually to Wal-Mart stores. In order to make that system work seamlessly, Wal-Mart has to agree with all 40,000 of its suppliers on what the tags will look like, what data to collect, how to process it and so on.”

“As we see this go into the consumer market, of course we are consumers of consumer goods from the civilian market and it would be foolish if we did not have this data to be able to reuse it in our own system,” says Boomer. “It would be very stupid to have someone ”˜fat finger’ in the information when there is an RFID tag there that we can get that information from automatically.”

That’s good for knowing how many rolls of toilet paper one has. But for pharmaceutical companies that have proprietary rights on a particular medication, or just want to make sure the right amount of medications are getting to pharmacists and not being diverted away, the use of RFID is also proving particularly useful, especially since the United States Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has issued guidelines for “e-pedigrees,” electronic records that allow drug shipments to be traced from manufacturers to pharmacists.

Smith says the promise of RFID is to track items right through the supply chain and, through that ability assure their pedigree, knowing they haven’t been stopped, diverted or delayed, which would all be indications of attempts at theft or tampering. EPCGlobal is in the process of running a couple of trials through Asia and into the United States. However, the infrastructure is still being built and standards are still in the process of being set. EPCGlobal is “in the first inning of a nine-inning game. 

“The FDA put a stamp in the ground and said, ”˜we are going to demand e-pedigrees are in place.’ Florida is the first state out with a regulation for that, subsequently followed by California,” says Smith. “Across the U.S., out of concern for patient safety and making sure that all drugs are properly monitored, there is a requirement that every item produced within the drug supply chain where you ship an item, is going to require a serialized number assigned to that product and, as it is shipped through the supply chain, the electronic pedigree must be produced.

“You can imagine the administrative bureaucracy if you tried to administer that manually and the documents that would flow,” he says. “The challenge has been, how do we move that to an RFID structure and that’s what we’ve done in producing an e-pedigree guideline.”

Sabetti says the technology for tracking large items through the shipping process is fairly mature but “there is a transition we’re going through where shipping companies and the owners of assets are trying to get to the next level of granularity. That level of granularity is described as the pallet- or case-level tracking. We are in a phase now where that activity is ramping up in its installation.”

 “Whole technologies are based on how inventors invent and people come up with new ideas. It’s evolving, very much like how the Internet and e-mail grew,” says Smith. “Once the infrastructure is in place, I think all the other applications will start spreading like wildfire as new ways to use this technology are found. Right now, we’re just at the very beginning. It’s the first wave of this technology that has come to the marketplace and you’re just about to see a massive wave of new inventions, new ways of using this technology that will change everything we currently know about it.”

Boomer adds that tracking from moment to moment can also be cost prohibitive because it would require active tags which are far more expensive, not just for the units themselves, but for the use of communications satellites to track it. And some of that information is also superfluous. An active tag reporting on the location of a container won’t change its condition much from one minute to the next as it’s being ferried over the ocean, for instance. That’s where information systems need to be geared to handle the data according to the requirements of those tasked with handling it.

“The biggest thing for it now is the buy-in,” says Moroz. “Most companies today are being exposed to the technology. I think they’ve heard of RFID and have some general understanding of it. But they don’t have a strong understanding of what the technology is about, how to cost justify it and how to integrate it into their systems. Unfortunately, there’s not that many people out there who understand it who can help in that area.”

Sabetti recommends installers and integrators access information about RFID through online sources and “anything from RFID For Dummies which is available from Amazon.com, to a five-day course where you go into a lab, install a system, write code, attach tags and so on.”