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Every August Nancy's Specialty Foods begins to go quiche crazy. Production in the company's Newark, Calif., plantramps up five-fold over normal to prepare for the holidays. Soon there is little freezer space to spare in the 86,000-square-foot facility. No matter what else goes on at Nancy's, one thing will continue. "You can't stop an oven," said David Siegfried, Nancy's information technology manager. Because if ovens were to cool, an assembly line to stall, Nancy's would begin leaching money.

"At times we've had from 15 to 45 people standing there in excess of an hour," Siegfried said. "Multiply that times their pay rate, and now they're behind. Now you've got to pay them overtime." Falling behind risks losing sales. When the holiday season's last truck leaves Nancy's and product isn't ready, the truck goes with whatever is loaded. "When we sell one time a year, if it doesn't make it there on time, the stores say, 'We're not going to be able to sell it through. Cancel the order.'"

That risk, among other factors, prompted Nancy's to launch a pilot project exploring how radio frequency identification (RFID) could improve its inventory management. Siegfried and his crew brought in RFID readers, mobile computers and tags from Intermec. Stratum Global provided its TagNet suite of enterprise RFID software modules. Nancy's could have made a standard upgrade to its existing system, but Siegfried and his colleagues saw how leaping a generation of technology could solve more than just inventory management problems.