[05/21/07] MoreRFID
MoreRFID.com recently had an interview from Fred Kohout, Chief Marketing Officer, TAGSYS RFID, about recent development in TAGSYS.
TAGSYS introduced an interesting program, called "Six Sigma Performance Program." What is it about?
The program is really about Quality of Service (QoS). The idea is to view RFID like a network and to provide the same level of service people can expect from voice and data networks. The Six Sigma Performance Program (SSPP) offers a performance guarantee of fewer than four failures in one million read opportunities in the item-level track-and-trace process. We build the solution, we implement the solution, and we sign off on the performance. If more than four failures occur in a million opportunities, the guarantee is that we are going to come and fix the problem. We offer the SSPP to our pharmaceutical customers because this is the performance metric the industry requires.
There are a few other aspects to the SSPP. We also offer the SSPP as a subscription service wherein TAGSYS installs and owns the infrastructure and, for a monthly fee, customers can choose the level of performance they want.
The SSPP also comes with a "Tech Refresh" feature. This means we upgrade a customer's RFID network with the latest technology as it becomes available-and invisibly. Customers won't have to know or care exactly what version of the technology they have; all they know is it's just getting better all the time. This is also a flat monthly rate, and we guarantee customers have latest technology when it is available. This is very much like the cellular phone model.
In addition, we are trying to move the industry beyond the HF and UHF frequency debate. Each protocol has fundamental merits, and we really try to match frequency to each customer's specific challenges. For now the SSPP is HF only, but when UHF can offer this level of performance, we will be happy to put it into the program. (For further reference on the frequency debate, please see IDC's white paper entitled "Item-Level Tagging: Moving Beyond the Frequency Dilemma.")
It's also important to note the SSPP is based on 18 months of operational data. We are able to make this guarantee because, over 18 months, we have read millions of units in live production and at live speed. In some instances we performed better than the existing technologies.
So the SSPP is about QoS. The performance guarantee, the subscription service, and the Tech Refresh feature all support this. We are not getting stuck in the HF and UHF discussion; in fact, we are moving the discussion forward.
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