Port Centric Logistics

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Guglielmo Marconi’s historic transmission of a radio signal from Poldhu in Cornwall England to a receiver at Signal Hill, St. John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, the Marconi company asked a team of its radio experts to duplicate the feat. These radio experts determined that it was not possible to duplicate the December 12, 1901 transmission using a replica of Marconi’s equipment. The extensive use of the radio spectrum today creates so much ‘noise’ that the signal would simply have been lost in the ‘clutter.’

One of the key early market drivers for RFID adoption has been mandates from the likes of retailing giant Wal-Mart and the United States Department of Defense. Wal-Mart announced in 2003 that it would require its top 100 suppliers to become RFID compliant – by tagging at the case and pallet level – by January 1, 2005. Other major retailers soon followed Wal-Mart’s lead. The US Department of Defense required its 43,000 suppliers to put passive tags on cases, pallets and items costing $5,000 or more. An estimated 45 million items are covered by this mandate.

On June 7th, 1999 a New Work Item Proposal was filed with the Inter national Organization for Standardization (ISO) entitled, ‘Radio-frequency communication protocol for electronic recognition of seal status and number, and container number.’ By the conclusion of the 2nd meeting of the working group assigned this work item (ISO TC 104/SC 4/WG 2) on July 29th, the title had been modified to ‘Radiofrequency communication protocol for electronic seal for freight containers’ with a scope to develop an ‘international standard (that) specifies a RF communication protocol between an electronic seal and its reader.’

With globalisation, mergers and acquisitions, deregulation, competition, quality of service to customer and costs, companies have been forced to concentrate more on core businesses and outsource as many processes as possible. Companies are making a shift in using Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to respond to these demands which is causing a significant change in the way business is being done today, giving executives a creative edge.