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•Industry Brief: Motorola's Wholesale Distribution RFID Solutions

Today's distribution center is no longer just a stationary facility with four walls and a roof. Wholesale distributors today manage virtual trading networks with inventory at partner/supplier depots, on the road, on the loading dock and inside the four walls.

Labor has and will continue to be one of the largest operational costs (outside of the cost of goods) for wholesale distributors. Wholesale distributors are faced with the rising costs associated with managing a work force — employees' salaries, benefits and productivity. In order to combat these challenges, wholesalers are looking for new technologies to automate manual processes, thereby reducing labor requirements, improving productivity, reducing errors and streamlining business operations.

For wholesale distributors, process improvements mean profits. RFID technology enables new workflow process improvements and the associated savings can be applied directly to the bottom line. "With this technology, it also is possible to cut out much of the paperwork and labor involved with trading partners", says Mike Liard, RFID analyst for Venture Development Corporation. "For example, say a company ships cheese using tags on pallets and cases. With RFID, it can provide shipping notice with all product serial numbers so the receiver knows in advance what the shipment consists of. From a distribution standpoint, especially from shipping and receiving, RFID offers an 85 percent labor reduction."

Significant competitive advantage is realized by maintaining up-to-thesecond inventory, reducing safety stock from more accurate demand models, and improving data integrity and accuracy from the time inventory is received to the time it leaves the shipping dock. This ideal scenario is played out as distributors replace point-andread, labor-intensive operations with RFID systems that track RFID-tagged pallets, cases, cartons and individual items anywhere, anytime.

RFID infrastructure products including fixed and handheld readers, portal and reader systems, vehicle-mounted readers and RFID tags, combine with enterprise manufacturing software and applications to deliver operational benefits that impact almost every function a wholesale distributor performs.

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•Industry Brief: Motorola's Wholesale Distribution RFID Solutions