Promoting Success From Within

RFID technology providers SAP and OATSystems credit Kimberly-Clark Corporation as a key driver in their joint effort to develop a standardized RFID infrastructure to support the broad market needs. Working closely with SAP and OAT, the brand owner of Huggies, Kleenex and Scott helped to design the appropriate interfaces between SAP AII and the OAT Foundation Suite. Kimberly-Clark has since piloted the first standardized interfaces between SAP AII (Auto-ID Infrastructure) and the OAT Foundation Suite.

This month, Consumer Goods Technology caught up with Kimberly-Clark's Mike O'Shea, director of Auto-ID Sensing Technologies, and Greg Tadych, director of Business Systems, to delve deeper into the company's motives for actively pursuing RFID solutions for use both within its own walls and within the consumer goods industry at large.

Please share Kimberly-Clark's stance on the adoption and emergence of RFID.
O'Shea: Kimberly-Clark is focused on driving value for our customers, shoppers and users, and we feel that if we can exploit RFID technology effectively, it can provide value for all. In the near term, we are focused on our retail customer partners. We believe there is an opportunity to improve things such as retail out-of-stocks and supply chain processes. If we can address and enhance an important issue such as one of these, it drives value both for our retail customers and Kimberly-Clark. 

How is RFID being used within Kimberly-Clark today and on what scale?
O'Shea: We are engaged in pilots with retail partners in the United States and Europe. Wal-Mart, Target and Albertsons are receiving tagged cases and pallets; and Metro is receiving tagged pallets in Germany.

Why did Kimberly-Clark decide to take an active role in developing RFID technology?
O'Shea: As a global company, it is important to Kimberly-Clark that we have a platform that we can use to better manage and support our operations around the world. To accomplish this, we no longer could afford to simply integrate a series of one-off solutions, while trying to exploit the value that RFID can bring. Therefore, we made the decision to take an active role in working with EPCglobal and the other participating organizations in the community to develop industry standards that will allow us to deploy RFID at a global level. Another value in being active up front is that we are developing our own human and intellectual capital around this technology. Some companies fail to recognize that RFID is not another form of symbology. The physics around RF introduces another level of complexity and Kimberly-Clark is going to be in a better position in managing those issues.
 
Why did Kimberly-Clark choose SAP and OATSystems as partners in RFID?
Tadych: Kimberly-Clark is using OATSystems for the initial pilot (mandate) applications with our retail customers, and directionally for global RFID device management and intelligent data collection capabilities. OATSystems has also been an early key player in the RFID technical and applications capability arena, and we wanted to leverage its success in these areas for Kimberly-Clark's initial pilots. SAP's RFID business application solution does not "come with" a RFID device management solution, so our objective was to encourage SAP and OATSystems to work together to combine the intelligent RFID device management and data collection capabilities of OATSystems into and alongside our SAP RFID post-mandate applications solutions. This allows Kimberly-Clark to leverage the key RFID capabilities of both OATSystems and SAP to drive scalable and robust enterprise-wide RFID solutions.

How is the SAP-OAT RFID offering unique?
Tadych: One unique aspect is that OATSystems has a recognized RFID "intelligent" device management and data collection capability, with some additional RFID data integrity management capability (things like duplicate RFID-read detection and filtering, event-triggered RFID-read integrity, etc.). 
This intelligent RFID device management and low-level data collection integrity provided by OATSystems is a required foundation upon which Kimberly-Clark could integrate with and leverage the SAP RFID solutions.

Has Kimberly-Clark piloted the SAP-OAT RFID interface and on what scale?
Tadych: We have internally piloted the SAP-OATSystems joint RFID solution during late 2004/early 2005, and are continuing to work with SAP and OATSystems to refine this interface so as to provide the platform for our next-generation (post retailer pilot mandates) RFID applications.  We hope to go into next-generation RFID applications pilots by late 2005.
 
What benefits do you anticipate?
Tadych: Key benefits of the OATSystems integration with SAP are a more manageable, scalable and lower cost of ownership for RFID device management and first-level data collection, which Kimberly-Clark will then deploy value-added RFID business applications using SAP enterprise solutions along with other key enabling RFID business application solution providers.