Kimberly-Clark Believes in the Future of RFID - ' Flattening the Learning Curve '

Ground zero for RFID at Kimberly-Clark is its massive manufacturing plant and distribution center in Neenah, Wis. Roughly 5,000 square feet of the facility has been built out as a laboratory just to test RFID. Its formal name is the Auto-ID Sensing Technologies Performance Test Center.

Designed to reflect actual factory and distribution facilities, the lab has a 270-foot-long conveyor loop, part of which runs at factory speeds of 200 and 250 feet per minute, while another part duplicates the 600 feet-per-minute speed used at Wal-Mart, Target and other retailers.

The lab has a full-sized stretch-wrapper of the same kind Kimberly-Clark uses to shrink-wrap "cubes" of, say, 60 boxes of Huggies to ship to a retailer. There's also a table with more than a dozen different RFID tags, including some with antennas printed on paper.

Mike O'Shea, giving a tour of the lab, pointed to a row of doors that lead onto the shipping dock. There are RFID readers mounted next to each doorway, but they're useless. "Look how close together the doors are," O'Shea said. "The reader on one door picks up the signals from something coming into the other door."

In other words, outfitting the roughly 1,000 dock doors at various Kimberly-Clark facilities would not prevent the packing errors that are among the reasons the company is investing in RFID.

Putting the readers on the forklifts used to load the trucks presents its own set of problems. Besides the prospect of the readers being crushed, there's also the fact that RFID doesn't transmit well through metal. "We aren't completely dressed for the dance yet," O'Shea said.

There have been productive lessons learned, however. Kimberly-Clark has figured out that tagging the upper left corner of individual boxes gives the most accurate reads when, later, these boxes are shrink-wrapped and might wind up in the middle of a cube. And the company has discovered, too, that it will need different tags for different kinds of products—tags and readers that work with paper towels, for instance, don't work well with wet wipes.

To resolve that matter and others, the company is considering setting up a separate lab in Roswell, Ga. The company is also upgrading its warehouse management system, which currently communicates with forklifts over the same 915MHz frequency used by RFID.

And then there are environmental concerns. The lab recently shipped two stacks of goods by boat to Malaysia so that the effects of temperature, humidity and other factors could be monitored, in an effort to get a sense of the issues that might arise when exporting product. There's even research into what impact RFID tags might have on the environment itself. "There are still a lot of challenges," O'Shea said. "I'll be at this job for a while."

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Kimberly-Clark Believes in the Future of RFID

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