DHL demands more visibility

Like the keenest of preachers, global account manager in the DHL life sciences team Marc Fait draws on the New Testament to illustrate his point.

His message is that the need for visibility goes back a long way. Unfortunately, he names the wrong man as the doubting apostle - blaming Peter instead

He goes on to say that the supply chain is changing. Before,supply chain people only focused on their own step of the process.They delivered raw materials to production,for example,and were happy; they had done their bit. If something went wrong further along the chain, these people at the first link never got to hear about it, there was never any feedback.

"Now,"Fait says,"the supply chain is also the demand chain and we need to know what will happen further down the line."

The example he quotes is pharmaceutical manufacturer Bristol-Myers Sguibb. DHL worked with this customer to provide special temperature-sensitive packaging and monitoring devices for some of its products, storing them in a central DHL warehouse near Waterloo in Belgium.

What worked well in this case, he says, was allowing key people on the customer side to have secure access, through log-in and password on a web page, to information regarding their shipments.

Unstoppable

He says DHL is looking closely at RFID, precisely because of the unstoppable trend in the supply chain to have greater visibility.

"It can help us track and trace shipments," he says,"and reduce human mistakes. I'm lobbying internally for this because I want to link it to cold chain transportation. On the web page in the previous example, we could give, not just the waybill number, but the temperature of the product.

"We want to compress the supply chain, we want it to be faster, and I believe RFID can help us."

Up in the air

He draws the valid distinction between active and passive tags. Active, which have their own power source, are the ones that have especially caught Fait's eye.

He envisages putting these tags onto air-freight packages/'During flights," he explains/'packages could communicate with satellites to let you know that your shipment is, say, over the Indian Ocean. You'd be able to keep track of it while it's in the air."

Then,as though he's suffered a mood swing, he delivers a series of caveats.Of RFID-tagged parcels passing through a reader on a conveyor belt, he says, 1% evade scanning.

Conduct a similar exercise with pallets going through a portal reader and, he claims, the figure for failure is 3%. And he even picks holes in his own in-flight tracking scenario. He wonders how the RFID tags would affect the flight instruments of the aircraft.

Besides, he reckons connections between tag and satellite would have a much higher failure rate, perhaps as much as 30%.

You have to draw out of him that even this would represent a 70% improvement thanks to RFID.The current situation is that the number of air-freight packages DHL can track while they're flying over the Indian Ocean is zero.

He also believes the privacy issue is one that could affect a logistics provider such as DHL, because members of the public are on the receiving end of millions of its packages.

"RFID has a lot of potential for the future, but not for tomorrow," he says. "It's not there yet. We may have it in 2007."