Xterprise Customers' Capacity Exceeds Five Million RFID Tags

Over 5,000,000 cases a year labeling capacity is in place and growing with Xterprise customers. A new study shows the demand for increased capacity and data aggregation will continue.

Dallas (PRWEB) September 12, 2005 -- Xterprise Incorporated, an industry leading solutions provider, consultant and compliance expert for the "RFID Enabled Supply Chain" announced its customers have passed the benchmark capacity of 5,000,000 RFID labels a year.

Xterprise officials say installed capacity will soon exceed 15,000,000 RFID labels a year. Installed capacity will continue to rise because of upgrades the company has made in its XARM 3000 and 4000 solutions, and because of recent project wins at some of the world's largest retail suppliers. Most Xterprise customers are using RFID in retailer supply chain logistics for case and pallet tags. The company said a number of customers are expanding capacity by upgrading their XARM solutions to achieve higher quantities and higher levels of automated performance.

"The XARM enhancements provide a number of performance and price advantages over other alternatives," said Tom Abraham, Director of Solutions at Xterprise. "By working closely with our partners Alien, Zebra Technologies, Apriso, Weber and DPI, we achieved a 250 percent increase in throughput over our already best-in-class solutions. As retailers expand tagging requirements, we will continue to provide higher capacity and add more value by using the number of the RFID data aggregation and data exchange features that are in our solutions."

The company provides RFID infrastructure capacity with it's low volume solutions of XARM 1000 & 2000 (manual and software integrated slap 'n ship) and medium to high volume offerings with its XARM 3000 (conveyor automated tag and label placement) and the XARM 4000 in-line conveyor manufacturing solutions. These solutions can be software integrated into practically any WMS or ERP solutions that are being run by its customers.

The company stated it expects the market will require greatly increased tagging capacity over the next 12 months, with the market growing by 500 percent.

"We are now entering a phase where focus in RFID infrastructure solutions is on automation and maturity rather than on physics," Abraham said. "It can now be said that both manual and high speed application of RFID tags on cases is both technically proven and effective in meeting major retailer's mandates."

As a result, Xterprise is focusing internal investments on leading the industry in the automation and information exchange trend.

In addition, the company announced completion of a customer benchmarking study on RFID tagging. The study showed only a few retail suppliers who invested modestly in RFID tagging and data aggregation will be able to reduce their overall cost of compliance as expanding RFID tagging volumes are required. The study showed RFID automation and integration of data are critical elements in RFID economics. Xterprise benchmarking also showed many retail suppliers underestimated the value of adding some automation to their initial tagging solution and they underestimated the importance of deploying a solution that can effectively use RFID information from the retailer. The combination of these two elements is essential to minimizing cost and maximizing benefit for a positive ROI. Most companies who initially chose manual processes are finding the labor costs and the lack of data visibility are a hindrance to scaling RFID, and as a result are unable to extract supply chain value from their RFID implementations.

• have a significant amount of experience understanding the nuances of these systems and managing the EPC data that they create, to enabled demand signaling decisions in the future," added Dan Ahearn, Vice President of Services for Xterprise. "Putting tags on boxes becomes the initial table stakes. You have to be able to do it reliably and efficiently, but as the requirements continue to scale upward from the retailers and you have to be able to support the increased tag requirements, the data analytics and the data exchange requirements that enable the ROI's we are building."

Xterprise is headquartered in Carrollton, TX and currently serves customers in Asia, Europe and North America. For more information, visit www.xterprise.com or call 972-690-9460, ext. 300.

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