Print Solutions Magazine, March 2004 -- Hot Technologies Cool Solutions, Page 1

If you're not offering technology solutions to customers, you're feeling the heat. Competition is fierce for new accounts, and end users demand customized solutions that save them time and money. Printing pros who move boldly toward new ideas are best suited to succeed.

New technologies are hitting the market at a fever pitch. Learning about them and offering one to customers is a significant step for distributors and manufacturers. The three companies featured on the following pages made bold moves, and they're thriving today:

Matrics Inc., Columbia, Md., helps McCarran International Airport enhance security, efficiency and customer satisfaction by providing radio-frequency identification tags. page 38

Jerome Group, St. Louis, gives Starwood Hotels and Resorts a faster, targeted solution for member cards through digital printing. page 46

Suncoast Marketing Inc., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., provides an engineering and architectural consulting firm with better print management, thanks to an e-commerce tool. page 54

Hello, printing pros, this is your captain speaking. We realize you have a lot of choices when you select a new technology, and we want to thank you for choosing radio-frequency identification. I would tell you to sit back and relax, but you're too entrepreneurial for that. So fasten your seat belts--we'll be cruising at an altitude that's up to you.

No sober pilot would say those words to passengers, but leaders at one of the busiest airports in the United States are betting that radio-frequency identification (RFID) will take off.

McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas handles more than 65,000 bags a day. Until this year, it tracked those bags the way most airports do--by affixing bar coded labels to them. Those labels often get crumpled or torn because bags are handled roughly and repeatedly by handlers and other airport personnel. That's why 90 percent is considered a good bar code read-rate for airports, says Samuel Ingalls, airport information systems manager at McCarran.

Even McCarran, which is known for being technologically advanced, dealt with 6,500 problematic bags a day. "Almost all of them made it to their correct flights, but they had to be accounted for manually," Ingalls says. "Line those bags up end to end, and it's extremely long. Picture someone weaving through that line, having to check each one. We had to reroute them, feed them back into the conveyor system or take them to a bag room. Aside from that, anyone who has had a lost-bag experience knows how awful the feeling is."

Inefficiency, labor costs and customer service are important concerns to McCarran, but its primary one is security. After 9/11, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that airports had to begin screening all bags for explosives. "We needed a very high degree of accuracy to make sure we send each bag back to the right airline and not interfere with their ability to get the bags into the airline system," says Randall H. Walker, McCarran's director of aviation. He directs operations and expansion projects for Clark County's six airports. Nearly 1,000 people are under his leadership.

The Clark County Department of Aviation, which runs McCarran, knew the TSA had been testing RFID technology successfully on some Delta Air Lines flights between Jacksonville, Fla., and Atlanta. The company behind the technology was Matrics Inc., a Columbia, Md.-based provider of RFID systems that operate in the ultra high frequency spectrum (UHF). (See "Warming Up with RFID: 3 Things to Know" on page 42.)

Under terms of a 5-year contract announced Nov. 4, Matrics will supply approximately 20 million tags annually to McCarran. At a cost of approximately 25 cents per tag, the total value of Matrics' contract with the airport is roughly $25 million. McCarran is the first airport in the world to commit to deploying an airport-wide RFID system for tracking passenger baggage.

Tag...RFID Is It

Fred Kresal stands near dozens of boxes that rest on a forklift in Matrics' aptly named Demo Room. If he turned around, he would see rows of shirts on hangers and numerous products on shelves. A microchip no thicker than a few strands of Kresal's thin beard is affixed to each item. Matrics organized the products in the room to showcase the value of RFID technology and to help explain the firm's capabilities to resellers, some of whom work at printing firms.

Kresal, who spends most of his time providing on-site training at end user locations, holds a sample of a newly designed RFID tag and describes its benefits. "This technology is cool," he says. "More importantly, it works." A blue sign adorning the Demo Room's rear wall depicts Matrics' vision: "The Future of RFID Today." Kresal's business card puts it differently: "Tag the World."

That's an ambitious goal, especially because many people hear "RFID" and think, "What in the world?" Here's the gist: RFID is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify items. The most common way is to store a serial number that identifies a product (and perhaps other information) on a microchip that's attached to an antenna. The antenna enables the chip to transmit identification information to a reader. The reader sends out electromagnetic waves that form a magnetic field when they "couple" with the antenna on the RFID tag. A "passive" RFID tag draws power from this magnetic field and uses it to power the microchip's circuits. The chip then modulates the waves the tag sends back to the reader, and the reader converts the new waves into digital data stored in a computer database.

As Kresal speaks to trainees in the Demo Room, he explains how Matrics offers ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID systems that can span a variety of data collection applications, including solving security problems facing airports, government agencies and law enforcement groups. Low-cost, passive, UHF RFID tags carrying unique ID numbers can be embedded in paper stock for baggage tags to create smart bag tags. They also can be incorporated into passenger tickets and boarding passes, into friends-and-family access passes, as attachments to cargo containers, as access points to restrict entry, and on baggage for security screening and automatic sorting. Matrics sells RFID tags, readers and antennas to nearly 100 customers, including nine airports.

"When we won the contract with McCarran, we were excited," says John C. Shoemaker, vice president of corporate development at Matrics Inc. He had taken a lead role in defining the marketplace, approaching airports and airline associations, and talking to engineering firms and other partners about RFID implementation. Shoemaker's message: "Here's a technology that can do what you need to accomplish efficiently and accurately, and at a price point the industry hasn't seen before," he says.

Until now, RFID use has been limited because available systems typically have close read ranges, are capable of limited numbers of simultaneous reads and suffer from less-than-perfect data-transfer rates. Airports have considered using the technology to track baggage for more than a decade, but the high cost of RFID tags prevented them from switching from bar code systems. The TSA's mandate for baggage screening came as the cost for RFID tags was dropping.

Today, RFID technology is used for everything from tracking cows and pets to triggering equipment down oil wells. The three most common applications are tracking goods in supply chains, tracking items in production lines, and enhancing security. Annual shipment volume of RFID tags is expected to grow from 323 million in 2002 to 1.62 billion in 2007, according to Allied Business Intelligence, an Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based firm offering IT research.

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