9:00 - 11:00 The Asset Visibility (AV) Program

This session will discuss the DLA’s mission to provide a joint logistics capability that collects and fuses information from multiple Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), Military Service, and U.S. Transportation Command Systems, thereby providing users with a timely and accurate report of the location, movement, status, and identity of units, personnel, equipment, and supplies in the global distribution logistics pipeline.

What will be covered:

• Support Humanitarian Assistance efforts/disaster preparedness planning
• Increase readiness/decrease transportation cost through visibility of lateral support and DoD excess opportunities
• Reduce re-ordering with status of items in storage, process, transit, or theater

What will be covered:

• See tangible examples of timely accurate reports of location, movement, status and identity of supplies in the logistics pipeline
• Understand inventory mapping and low-bandwidth option
• Discuss options for achieving TAV in your supply chain

Session Leader:

Karen Blanck
Deputy Program Manager, Asset Visibility, Defense Logistics Information Services
DLA

11:00 - 1:00 Maximizing Supply Chain Productivity and Efficiency

Lunch will be served

Applying RFID research to develop and better understand the interaction between RFID and product, package and distribution environment is the goal that will be demonstrated within this workshop. You will be able to understand how to use this knowledge to develop guidelines to assist RFID implementation as well as the solutions for RFID integration problems.

What will be covered:

• Examples of RFID readability from the shipper’s and purchaser’s viewpoint
• Challenges in reading and writing tags during processing, handling, storage, logistics, etc.
• Manufacturer case studies to best define how to pre-apply tags in the shipping case

How you will benefit:

• Determine how well reads may occur within a facility or maintenance depot
• Concrete ways in which you can apply this research to develop effective and meaningful improvements to your supply chain

Session Leader:

Robb Clarke, MBA, PhD
MSU School of Packaging Auto-ID Testing and Research Center
Michigan State University

1:00 – 3:00 Energy Harvesting and the Future of Innovation in RFID

The link between energy harvesting and attaining total asset visibility is possible in improved RFID innovation and technology. This can play a pivotal role in the advancement of your supply chain management systems. This workshop will highlight this link, present the cutting edge solutions and how they can be incorporated into use.

What will be covered:

• Latest RFID technology advancements
• Interoperability challenges and RFID solutions and energy harvesting options

How you will benefit:

• Hear application examples of these innovations to improve supply chain operations at your organization
• Learn from methods to integrate advanced technology in any supply chain system
• See examples of working adaptations

Session Leader:

Dr. Marlin Mickle
Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor, and Director, RFID Center of Excellence
University of Pittsburgh

3:00 – 5:00 Interoperability to Achieve Real-Time Visibility

Ensuring interoperability is a critical element of combining systems for total asset visibility. However, there isn’t an out of the box solution to achieve this effect. RFID plays a role in facilitating this transition. Simulations and visualization tools can help demonstrate this process and this workshop will allow you to see a clear link that you can apply to your supply chain.

What will be covered:

• Challenges in bringing real time visibility to physical objects and processes using RFID
• Questions related to your process concerning identity, timestamp, location and business context

Demonstrations of:

• Large scale simulators for a variety of facility types
• Lightweight protocols based on RSS

How you will benefit:

• Discover how simple technological advancements can dramatically improve data processing and analysis
• Hear actual examples of real time visibility to physical objects and processes using RFID

Session Leader:

Dr. Abel Sanchez
Research Scientist, Software Architect, AutoID Laboratories
Massachusetts Institute of Technology