Las Vegas, NV
5:30p.m.-7:00p.m.
Who's who from left to right: Dr. John Ryan, Administrator, Quality Assurance Division, Hawaii State Department of Agriculture, Victor Vega, Director, IC & Tag Product Marketing, Alien Technology, Scott Buss, Research Manager, Global Science & Technology, Kimberly-Clark, Mark Fox, Senior Vice President, North America, Savi Technology, Scott Clements, VP and General Manager of Sensormatic, Rob Balgley, CEO, SkyeTek
 Laurie Sullivan, RFID World Online |
 Leslie Downey, RFID Revolution |
 Scott Buss, Kimberly-Clarke Lead Judge Sponsor and Administrator Winner Greg Matula, Hewlett-Packard Judge |
2008 RFID Award Winners
Excellence in RFID Implementation: The winner of this year's award for Excellence in RFID Implementation goes to the team of US DoD's PM-JAIT and Savi Technology for the implementation of the DoD's In-Transit Visibility Network (ITVN) This application, utilizing Savi's 433.92 MHZ active RFID technology, realizes the world's largest RFID-based cargo tracking system, encompassing 4,220 read-write stations across 45 countries, monitoring an average of 35,000 shipments daily. The application is impressive in its scope, deployment footprint and savings to the client estimated at least in the range of several hundred million dollars.
Excellence in RFID Pilot: The winner of the Excellence in RFID Pilot award is Kimberly-Clark, who teamed up with PINC Solutions and Motorola to pilot the concept of an RTLS enabled trailer yard management system utilizing passive RFID technology. Typical yard management systems today are very infrastructure heavy, resulting in excessive capital investments that make it challenging to achieve a positive ROI. This pilot broke new ground by not only utilizing passive RFID technology, but by combining RFID with data elements from other technologies, like GPS and Wi-Fi. The team managed to overcome several obstacles that challenged the pilot's success by developing solutions that not only addressed the challenges, but also established a stronger more robust system in the end. They created a tag enclosure that helped to improve read rates, while protecting the tags from environmentally harsh conditions. They utilized the mature state of existing GPS technology, rather than installing a possibly cumbersome active tag solution.
Excellence in RFID Technology: The winner of this year's award for Excellence in Technology is the Sensormatic® iREAD platform, a perpetual inventory system that is backwards compatible with existing EPC Gen 2 readers and tags. The iREAD read points configure themselves using standard Class 1 Gen 2 commands; hundreds of read points may be driven by one reader port with no hardware or firmware changes to the reader. A single coaxial cable carries the RF signals and DC power for the read points. Retailers can adapt its capabilities to almost any retail display configuration.
RFID Visionary of the Year: Victor Vega has been a strong foot soldier in the industry for many years. Mr. Vega was a pillar in the Alien RFID Academy and has trained scores of users and partners on RFID. This means that many people credit much of their success to the training they got at the Academy.
Most Innovative RFID Application: In this application, RFID becomes the eyes for the seeing-impaired. We saw the technology doing what it does best in a novel and humanitarian way: identifying objects and connecting to a speech engine and portable audio player to alert inform users about their immediate surroundings. This technology has potential for communities of individuals. Civic and social organizations can adopt something like this and create "disabled person friendly" locations.
Protecting the Environment The winner of the RFID Excellence in Protecting the Environment award is the Hawaii State Department of Agriculture, for their work with the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation in utilizing RFID as a cost effective and efficient means of providing accountability and security within the food supply chain for produce. The project was funded by the Economic Development Alliance of Hawaii and was piloted with fresh fruit and vegetables products from several of the state's largest produce suppliers. Designed by Lowry Computer with software provided by Globe Ranger, it encompassed a "Farm to Retailer" approach to traceability. Handheld readers and fixed portal readers were used at strategic tracking and transfer points to establish traceability. A unique factor for this project was the collaboration of various organizations and operations to adjust processes in order to provide data into this valuable system. A web interface is made available for all parties involved, to provide a conduit for tracking items through the handling routes and back to their source.