The Inevitable Growth Of RFID — Bill Arnold And Omron

Reprinted with permission from AIM and RFID Connections. Click here for more RFID Connection Interviews.

The U.S. is in the forefront of implementation of the Ultra High Frequency band, what we call the UHF band. There's quite a lot of implementation in most all the rest of the world, especially in the high frequency (the 13.56 MHz) that's been a standard that's been around a long time and is ISO certified. And there are very distinctive quantities of those systems that have been installed for lots of different applications. Everything from sushi bars to libraries are using some variation of either that 13.56MHz or 125 KHz, which is a low frequency band, that we also still offer. Again, there are regional differences. You probably would not go into a restaurant in the U.S. and have a total self-checkout payment plan for a buffet style or a cafeteria style restaurant. But that is quite a normal thing to have happen in Japan and some other parts of the world. That's kind of an interesting regional difference.

The other thing is that the UHF band has not been, and still is not, really totally available for deployment in Japan, for example. In the European communities they've accepted it and they've opened it up, but it's still country by country as to the exact date that that's going to be implemented. So we've got a head start (in the U.S.) in that frequency range, but you're going to see a lot more of the other frequencies continue for quite a while. And I actually believe the HF frequency is gaining a lot of traction. We're seeing a lot of communications about that regarding Item Level tagging for pharmaceuticals, simply because it's a more proven standard that's been around for a lot longer and the pharmaceutical companies seem to feel that makes it less risk for them. At the very least we're going to see the widespread adoption of HF and UHF dependent on the type of application that's being considered.

Bill Arnold, Chief Strategist, Omron RFID Division
With a background of more than 25 years in industrial sales, product marketing, new business development and project management for Fortune 500 companies, the last seven with Omron Electronics, Bill Arnold was a natural choice to be put in charge of the development and implementation of Omron's strategic initiative for RFID solutions in North America. As Omron Electronics product marketing manager, Bill grew sales in the Networks and I/O Products division by $1 million over a 2.5 year period and delivered the company's first sales certification training on a product. He was then asked to take an assignment to investigate growth opportunities in a strategic vertical market. When Omron's company–wide strategic sales initiative needed a project manager, Bill was asked to plan the implementation, and to shorten the deployment timing by two months. In his current role as chief strategist for Omron's RFID division, he has initiated a product development and marketing effort that has delivered more than $2.5 million sales of Omron RFID products. He continues to foster strategic alliances with RFID solution providers intended to promote adoption of RFID in supply chain applications.

AIM Global
AIM is a global trade association comprising providers of components, networks, systems, and services that manage the collection and integration of data with information management systems. Serving more than 900 members in 43 countries, AIM is dedicated to accelerating the growth and use of AIDC technologies and services around the world.

Our members are manufacturers or service providers of technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID), bar code, card technologies (magnetic stripe, smart card, contactless card, optical card), biometrics, and electronic article surveillance (EAS).