Meets Department of Defense Requirement

The U.S. Department of Defense’s mandate that suppliers tag shipments with radio frequency ID tags has created challenges for many of them. CSC’s work with a major DoD supplier to meet the mandate has made the CSC project leader Oracle Magazine’s RFID Architect of the Year.

CSC’s client, a major DoD supplier, needed to comply quickly with the agency’s 2006

			Related Information: Read a CSC case study involving RFID. Read a book review of Making the Most of RFID, by a CSC author. Learn about CSC’s RFID offerings. Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.

requirement that suppliers tag shipments with RFID tags. The mandate was intended to improve inventory control, streamline delivery of goods and improve visibility into shipments’ contents. The client’s individual business units were each planning to implement RFID solutions, but lacked a common vision. They also had different SAP versions that needed to connect to the RFID application.

With no off-the-shelf solution that would work, Dennis Alley lead a CSC team that worked with Oracle and the client to develop a system that could be tailored to each business unit. Alley’s team extended Oracle’s RFID Supplier Compliance Workspace application and database to be able to pull shipment information from existing third-party systems and deliver the RFID functionality desired by the client.

Alley crafted an interface between the client’s SAP systems and the compliance application. "We needed to be able to pick up shipment information from their SAP systems, bring it in to our compliance system, generate the RFID-enabled military shipping labels and then send the RFID-associated information back to SAP," Alley says. 

Centralized, yet tailorable

CSC created a Web-based application that accomplishes all of those steps, supporting RFID-enabled shipments to the DoD from five of the client’s shipping locations throughout the country. The system allows the client to electronically send advanced shipment notification with the associated RFID tag to the DoD.

CSC’s Dennis Alley, RFID Architect of the Year

"When we started the project, we thought each shipping location would have their own self contained system, but as we progressed through the project we determined it would make more sense to have a centralized server and have the satellite sites connected via the Internet," says Alley.

Each business unit uses a central server with remote access for each of the associated shipping locations, rather than isolated systems at each of the dispersed shipping locations. As a result, the application eliminates the need to install and support hardware and software systems for each shipping location. It will bring additional savings to the client as it continues to deploy RFID in new business units.

Poised to grow

Alley believes that RFID is still in prelimnary stages, but is poised to expand as buyers and suppliers realize more benefits.

Alley will receive the Oracle Magazine Editor’s Choice Award at Oracle Open World, October 22-26, in San Francisco.