Patrick J. Sweeney II is president and CEO of ODIN Technologies, Inc. and the author of “RFID for Dummies.” He founded ODIN in 2002 by recruiting the director of MIT’s Auto-ID lab, Daniel Engels. ODIN’s clients include the U.S. Department of Defense. We wanted to know about ODIN’s partnership with Airbus.
AM: Airbus selected ODIN for a partnership, could you tell us about that partnership?
Sweeney: Airbus went to great lengths to find an RFID (radio frequency identification) vendor they could trust to scale with their vision of RFID in the extended supply chain. The hard work, experience and talent of the ODIN team paid off by us being named their exclusive partner for the infrastructure integration services globally for the next five years.
RFID is a tremendous opportunity for the aviation industry from the manufacturing perspective, from the MRO perspective, it’s really a huge time and money saver and Airbus putting such a big investment around RFID is really the catalyst that this industry was looking for because they’ve done such a great job of co-opting their suppliers, it’s really going to do for the aerospace industry what the Wal-Mart announcement did for the retail industry a couple of years ago. Airbus is very excited about getting this off the ground and getting a large-scale project underway before their key competitor.
AM: Are you the only RFID supplier Airbus is working with?
Sweeney: We are their exclusive RFID partner for the next five years for global RFID hardware integration services; that will entail everything in Europe, the United States and all over the world. We will select hardware, test systems, install, configure, optimize systems and the RF environment – basically all the physics that make RFID a success or failure.
AM: Can you give us a little bit of detail about how the RFID technology is going to be used at Airbus.
Sweeney: Airbus is very similar to many companies that we’ve seen gain a competitive advantage with RFID. They have a great relationship with Accenture who helped Airbus do a lot of the ROI work to prove the business case. A lot of that ROI centers around manufacturing work in process tracking. After early success with a project tracking aircraft parts showed success – the RFID team had folks from four or five other areas and other disciplines say, “Well you know what, we think there is a business case ourselves and our findings make a lot of sense here as well to track X, Y and Z within our manufacturing process or to reduce our inventory.” The key thing that we found is as soon as they started to get knowledge around what the technology was capable of and saw it work first hand, the light bulb went off in their head. The interest within Airbus has grown dramatically given the fact that the technology has proven as successful as it has.
AM: When is the implementation going to take place?
Sweeney: We’ve got our team members already working with production systems in Germany and as the year rolls on, we’ll be branching on to other facilities tracking various components of the manufacturing work in progress. They have four or five very compelling projects identified that will have a significant impact on their bottom line.
AM: You’re also going with their suppliers. How will that relationship work?
Sweeney: If you look at what’s happened historically in the RFID industry, Wal-Mart was the big catalyst a couple years ago that said we’re going to make our own suppliers use this technology (to tag every case that comes into our distribution centers) and they really took out a “big stick” and threatened everybody with it and said you must do this. Airbus was very thoughtful in how they approached the RFID program and how they approached their supplier base, their extended enterprise, because they said “look we’ve got a definitive ROI and we can put some concrete numbers on and we think you’re going to get a ROI, too.” They are showing the partner network the increased visibility into the supply chain and we’ll have much greater insight into their inventory, which helps with material planning, production cycles and which will reduce inventory and lower costs. Airbus is very much helping to educate the supplier base in terms of the benefits of the technology. Some of the smart suppliers - the more competitive ones - are adopting RFID already. There are folks who might be making tires for instance, and can reduce their cost by 8 or 10 percent by using RFID, and are taking the attitude that they’ll have a big advantage they will have over competitors.
The aerospace industry specifically has a window of 18 to 24 months where RFID can be a competitive advantage, so it’s quite similar to some of the manufacturing automation systems or the barcode systems of the past. The folks who adopt RFID before everyone else have a head start in getting the benefits from the technology. ODIN has worked with several of these early adopters and seen fantastic returns because of the increased visibility and accuracy.
AM: What will happen after that? What will be the point?
Sweeney: After that initial two-year period, RFID will start to become a necessity for doing business in the aerospace and defense supply chain. Barcodes are not going away immediately, but they are 35-year-old technology. You can’t send a package through any supply chain without having a barcode on it today. However in two to three years, what you’ll find is that everything of value or importance will need an RFID tag on it and one of things that will happen in the aerospace industry is within seven to ten years, most aerospace manufacturers will have more RFID readers than they’ll have telephones because the technology is much more accurate and the costs have come down significantly. In fact, Intel announced, two months ago, an RFID reader on a chip that is just going to slice the costs of RFID dramatically. Look at the investment the U.S. Department of Defense is making in RFID, now Airbus, others in the industry as well. RFID is here to stay, no doubt about it.
AM: How does your vision of the RFID technology integrate with programs that are already in place that might have lean or six sigma management type programs.
Sweeney: It is really another highly sophisticated control mechanism that further eliminates human error. RFID increases the accuracy of those programs and it provides quality control because it’s automated, it’s serialized, so now, it’s no longer “do you have a life vest underneath that seat?” Now it’s “you have life vest #XYZ, it’s been there for three months, it needs to be replaced in eight months, etc….” Each RFID tag has its own unique serial number, it requires no human intervention and it doesn’t have to be a line of sight read type of thing – so you can read behind casings or through seats. It’s a much better control within the lean environment. In addition to that, most of the critical applications, SAP and Oracle, for instance, all have designed architecture to accept our RFID data.
AM: Can you talk a little about how you see RFID being used in the aircraft maintenance industry going forward, MRO specifically?
Sweeney: If you look at some of the large MRO operations the logistic challenges that come with associating specific parts with specific aircraft or engines, has been one of the biggest weaknesses of the process. There’ve been people who’ve tried to solve that problem a hundred different ways, usually by software. However the software still requires a human to count and capture some data – that’s the weak link. RFID allows a permanent, accurate and detailed record of the MRO process without humans getting involved. Some of the more sophisticated MRO operations are using some sensor-based technology on the aircraft coupled with RFID. That system might be reporting actual hours flown above a certain RPM or things like exhaust gas temperatures or ranges of temperature or anything like that on some of these aircraft. So the MRO activity is one of the key ones with almost always a twelve month return on investment (ROI), the work in process activity and also further out in the value chain, the tracking of luggage in all areas of the aerospace industry that RFID seems to be flourishing.
AM: There are a lot of complexities that go with the documentation of parts in the MRO business. How do you integrate the RFID technology with that factor?
Sweeney: There are a lot compliance issues that the typical MRO has to go through, the 8130-3 was referred to last year as “Mission impossible” at one conference. It’s changing and there are challenges around digital components. RFID can help make this transition. When you’re doing these tally sheets and you’re integrating the pedigree in the process, you’re going to go through a workbench inspection, you’re going to go through a very complex assembly bill of materials, you’re going to configure these assets and then create the work break down structure. All of these things are dependent on doing a manual process – counting, data capture, etc. So they’re all dependent on a person taking the proper documents, the tally sheets and trying to sort out the 8130. MRO shops are still manually inputting materials, time, services used and that sort of thing. And what RFID can do is to automate that input and take away the human element, which is where the inaccuracies come into the system. So, the fact that you’ve got a part being tracked, one of the really exciting innovations is the smart bench that ODIN technologies deploys. And essentially it’s a workbench where you might do a specific process but the bench itself is a RFID reader. So let’s say you bring in a part, an engine control unit, it gets set on the bench, soon as its set on the bench, it gets read and the RFID reader gets the date, the time stamp and the exact part serial number gets entered back into the system without a mechanic doing a single thing. The system knows that ECU arrived at the workbench at exactly 1330 hours on the 29th and this process was performed at this bench then it left at 1500 hours and went through the next process. So you can automate it without anyone ever having to do a manual record. You get the date stamp, the time stamp, and materialization which is really exciting if you look at the creative adoption of RFID. A lot of people tend to think of the RFID radar is a standing portal at a dock door. However the really innovative the things that we’re doing at ODIN include everything from building the benches to making wearable readers to not interrupt the business process, to putting readers inside smart cabinets for tool tracking.
So if you’ve got services requisitioning in management things like transponders, NDTs or even aircraft cleaning, if you could have the executions of those third-party services all validated and proven by the RFID technology. As far as cost controls and timing and being able to turn orders around, this is the first real technology that has been able to increase quality and at the same time reduce the time and the cost.
AM: How you can integrate the RFID with tooling tracking, inventory tracking, shipping…?
Sweeney: If you look at some of the MRO specific software or tools that are developed, one of the drawbacks is that when it goes through tool tracking, for example, when someone takes it out of the tool case, they have to perform a manual process. They either have to input something or they have to find a log to check that tool out. And we’ve all seen it hundreds of times where the technician is either in a hurry or overrides the process but doesn’t do it. A key benefit of RFID is that those types of things can be automated. If they’re doing the inspection where people do absolutely fill out their logs and write key things into the software, but rather than taking the time of a technician to fill out all the details of what’s done, if there’s an RFID tag, for instance, on a tool or if there’s an RFID tag on a device that’s being overhauled, then with that process that data capture can have it automatically. And so that’s really speed and accuracy. So if you think about what happens with some folks, the manual process of data counting and data capture are twofold. It used to be very manual. Someone would walk around with a clipboard and a pen and then capture the data and then count the number of items that they were capturing. Bar coding allows the data capturing to be automated but only at a certain level so you can only tell so much from it. But, you still had to manually count it and you had to scan each item – one at a time. What RFID does is it automates the data capture so it just has be within proximity of something and it automates the counting because for everything that has a tag on it, it’s going to get automatically counted. So really it’s the next evolution in the data capture. RFID can also carry a lot more information associated with it so you can do things like creating embedded relationships or parent-child relationships between individual parts and the larger part they belong to – a turbine on an engine for instance. You can say these five tags belong to this one parent tag on an engine for instance. So within the MRO, many of the things that takes a lot of time and where the Q-A process has to break down can now be automated because of the RFID.
AM: What can you tell us will be the next evolution for RFID; I mean what’s on the horizon?
Sweeney: Really, I think what’s on the horizon is based on two things: the RFID systems are only as good as the system’s accuracy. So a lot of people have made the mistake of not using a good scientific method to deploy the technology. So without a good understanding of physics, and without using a good scientific process, people may only get 70-80 percent read accuracy. Now, we’ve proven unequivocally at ODIN that 100 percent read accuracy is achievable in nearly any application. You just have to make sure you pick the right technology and a scientific method to deploy it. So, what’s going to happen in the future is that level of accuracy is now going to become scaleable to the point where an untrained RFID technician can plug in a reader, the reader can automatically look at the environment and create 100 percent accurate infrastructure, really all automated. So when that happens, people will be able to take one of these very inexpensive Intel-based RFID readers and drop them anywhere and they’ll self-configure and then you can have a tracking in parts, you know, either flyable or non-flyable parts throughout the manufacturing process, throughout the MRO facilities, throughout the airport. The challenge is going to arise when you have to monitor and maintain all these sophisticated mini-servers out in an austere environment – but that’s a longer discussion.
AM: Can you explain, in laymen’s terms, how you use physics to achieve such a high level of accuracy?
Sweeney: One thing that is very clear is that there’s no silver bullet out there for RFID, so you have to understand the physics of the environment. If it’s an highly metallic environment, if it’s an environment where there’s going to be ground based radar like localizer systems or eight types of facilities radar at an Air Force base, you have to use science to understand how that’s going to effect the systems you’re going to deploy. Various environmental factors must be taken into account because the physics of the different types of technology can be effected. Using tools like spectrum analyzers, signal generators and oscilloscopes before the actual installation can help your team understand if you should use high frequency, low frequency, ultra-high frequency, or maybe active RFID. The invisible waves in the air very much effect the read success that you’re going to get with a particular frequency. Understanding that there are laws of physics that have been in existence for generations which can tell you exactly how a specific wave is going to behave should be foundational thinking. Many software or integration companies simply don’t know or don’t respect those laws of physics and that’s where problems arise.
AM: Anything else you’d like to add?
Sweeney: Only the fact that ODIN probably employs a higher percentage of pilots than any other RFID company, and we love the aerospace industry!
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