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RFID

DePuy Orthopaedics, a division of Johnson & Johnson, has adopted an RFID solution for inspection and inventory control of orthopedic kits. DePuy is using RFID supply-chain systems from Odin Technologies (Dulles, VA), with UPM Raflatac UHF Gen 2 tags.

UHF Dogbone tags are placed on individually boxed orthopedic implants and related parts packaged in Express Care sets, with a master tag on the outer packaging.

Workers had previously inspected kits by manually scanning bar codes, taking 10–30 minutes for each kit. The automation has reduced kit inspection times to under a minute, while increasing productivity and quality control, Johnson & Johnson reported at RFID Journal Live.

DePuy is using Odin’s EasyTunnel reader, which supports 100% read rates in challenging applications, says Patrick Sweeney, president, Odin Technologies.

The EasyTunnel interrogation cell hosts an antenna array that envelopes shipping containers in RF energy, allowing item reads in any orientation. Part of Odin’s suite of RFID management solutions, EasyTunnel can be used for pharmaceutical applications for reading any type of ISO standard tag, Sweeney says.

For RFID monitoring, performance optimization, and infrastructure maintenance, Odin’s EasyMonitor software is provided in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. With EasyMonitor, users receive real-time visibility on RFID networks via a Web interface for performing functions that would otherwise require on-site visits and manual configuration of equipment.

“EasyMonitor is a tool we have been working on for three years that automates the entire RF infrastructure. For one client, we are monitoring 40 different warehouses from our secure data center in Northern Virgina,” says Sweeney.

“You can look at every reader you have globally, and broadcast out firmware upgrades with the click of a button,” he says. “If an antenna is hit by a forklift and degraded, EasyMonitor will send an e-mail to a person on-site alerting them to perform an automatic diagnostic sequence.”

“This addresses one of the biggest issues in the pharma space: How to maintain a network of RF hardware in a production environment, where, if a reader goes down, processes grind to a halt,” Sweeney says.

EasyMonitor can be integrated with the Odin EasyReader application, which creates a visual topography of sites’ reader deployment.