Intelleflex Helps Save Multiple Industries Money

Founded in 2003, Intelleflex, a champion of actionable data for the intelligent supply chain, is helping companies use industry standard RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) to improve their operations. Similar in purpose to other identification technologies, RFID supersedes barcodes in tracking objects and providing “actionable information” including temperature and condition information for use in a range of industries. Some have called RFID the saving grace of supply chains.

 “Traditional barcodes have limitations because they require being able to physically see the code to capture the information and can also get scuffed or removed. Intelleflex RFID can be read automatically, without having to see the tag (News - Alert) and can be read from around 300 feet away or through packaging, boxes, cartons and pallets,” Kevin Payne, senior director of Marketing, Intelleflex, recently told TMCnet.

 Two major markets that continue to implement RFID technology at a rapid pace are cold chain operators who provide perishable foods, and pharma organizations producing temperature-sensitive biopharmaceuticals.

“For example, you go to your favorite grocery store, buy raspberries that didn’t have a sufficient shelf life to begin with, and they go bad before you can enjoy them.” In such a case, the failure, he says, is in a supply chain that neglected properly manage the temperature of the raspberries at an optimum temperature through the supply chain, causing them to more rapidly lose “shelf life.” Now with our offering, users can access actionable data to significantly reduce temperature-related losses and reduce shrink and waste. “It is estimated that the food industry is losing anywhere between $35-40 billion dollars a year, and some industry insiders say half of that loss is due to temperature management issues. By using technology to detect temperatures of perishables “from the field to the fork,” supply chain providers can dramatically shrink losses and improve their bottom line, Payne added.

 Benefits of this next-generation solution include: traceability records documenting how perishables have been handled all the way from the point of harvest or production to the point of retail sale; and centralized, cloud-based storage of track-and-trace and condition data.

 With organizations attempting to meet their own or their industry’s “green” standards,  even grocery chains are changing the way they ship products, leveraging returnable transport containers that can be cleaned and sanitized for reuse, adds Payne. “That not only reduces costs but lowers the overall impact on the environment.” He says that container providers are also beginning to building temperature –sensitive tags into their containers, significantly improving quality control, management, traceability and reducing food waste.

In the biopharmaceutical space, he added, “In the coming years, eight of every 10 pharmaceutical products now have to be refrigerated and closely monitored. Therefore, we made our tags easy to through all kinds of pharmaceutical shipping containers, eliminating the need to unpackage and repackage the product.”

Intelleflex readers and tags have been on the market for only a year and a halfand Intelleflex is seeing extremely strong interest from growers due to quality and branding concerns Additionally, retailer grocers are increasingly interested in the solution for branding and quality but also because it can be readily integrated into existing supply chain processes.

 “We work exclusively with channel partners, including integrators, VARs, and software companies who specialize in specific industry solutions, and our technology is today being deployed in the Americas and Europe,“ Payne commented.

Looking to the future, the company will continue to invest in its newly introduced cloud-based service, coined ZEST, a secure, multi-tenant cloud-based data collection platform for aggregating and permission-based sharing of information. With ZEST, actionable data can be easily utilized via a Web browser for tracking, managing and monitoring products, assets and personnel. As a cloud-based solution, ZEST makes it much easier to share the information, eliminating the need for IT to deploy or manage it.

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