November 2000

A two-year trial by Sainsbury's and its logistics contractor Tibbett & Britten of a radio-frequency identification system ("smart tagging", as it is known) is said to have laid the ground for major improvements in supply-chain efficiency.

The trial was conducted at T&B's Allington distribution centre in Kent, where chilled produce was tracked in plastic crates fitted with RFID tags (with embedded microchip identifiers). Both crates and tags were re-usable, allowing the tags to serve as an aid to asset tracking in the crate pool as well as monitoring the contents of individual crates. The rates were tracked through two portals or "stargates" supplied by Omron, which monitored wheeled dollies carrying up to 40 such crates at once. Telxon handheld terminals capable of reading either RFID tags or conventional barcodes were also used with slower-moving items. Sainsbury's has so far avoided stating its exact intentions for future applications of this system, but project manager Mark Gillott has said that wide-scale adoption of the system "will create a step-change in the performance of the supermarket supply chain." He says a function that showed particular improvement was automation of receipt and despatch.