Boffins have talked about tagging every product in a supermarket and turning stores into a till-less shoppers paradise, but in reality, the majority of developments so far have been behind the scenes and in the labs.

So while a lot of the talk about RFID remains firmly in the realms of science fiction, there are some forward thinking companies which are stepping out of the laboratories and into the real world - with some impressive results.

And while you might expect the use of RFID tagging to be limited to the multi-billion dollar FMCG giants, you would be mistaken.

Worldwide Fruit, the UK based produce marketer, has, in conjunction with Marks & Spencer, taken the concept of tagging and applied it to its business - with remarkable effect.

Neal Collishaw, logistics manager with WWF, said the company was given a business directive by M&S to invest in new technology to take advantage of the retailer’s new tag embedded crates.

The purpose of the investment was to reduce problems associated with date life issues and miss picks and generally improve delivery accuracy.

“However, it became apparent at an early stage that the software required to write to the M&S tagged crates had no benefit to our business at all. All the benefits seemed to accrue once the product left our warehouse,” said Collishaw.

“They wanted us to invest thousands in it, which is fine, but we needed to get some benefit out of it.”

In fact, he said the bespoke software being offered would also only add to the problems from WWF’s point of view.

“The justification for the spend would also have been a challenge as around £40,000 would be required so that we would be compliant with M&S, with no benefit to WWF.”

He said the challenge of presenting such a situation to the board for acceptance would be difficult. To solve the problem WWF had to design its own software, which would work both with the RFID technology and its own in-house systems.

The company installed the necessary hardware in April 2003 and began testing its new software, PAV (pick accuracy verification), in September.

Collishaw said: “PAV went live in October with immediate impact to our business. Service levels improved in the first week and have not decreased since.”

Effectively, Collishaw said the company’s accuracy on orders for M&S increased from 99.5 per cent to 99.98 per cent. He said while those figures might not sound enormous, it nevertheless shows a solid business case for investing in the system. The remaining 0.02 per cent relates to product still shipped in cardboard boxes.

“People have said where’s the business case for RFID, but a 0.5 per cent improvement in accuracy means a lot to us, and would mean something to other businesses too,:” said Collishaw. The company was now recovering around £159,000 in lost revenue each year.

He said other companies from a variety of sectors, including Heinz, the Summer Fruit Company, Northern Foods and Geest, have visited WWF to assess the system and its potential application to their businesses.

“We are delighted that we started work on this initiative early and have progressed to where we are now.

“It’s been a huge benefit to us. It’s probably the first time we’ve had something come down as a demand from a retailer that we’ve been able to benefit from. If suppliers approach these things right, then it can be a win win situation for everyone.

“We invested a significant sum of money in this, particularly for a fresh produce company, but the system has paid for itself within six months.”

The company is now in the process of rolling out the system to its secondary production facilities.

One of WWF’s leading apple and strawberry grower packers, Charles Gaskain, is now up and running and order fulfilment accuracy has increased from 98.6 per cent to 99.8 per cent. A third site is also now being prepared and upgraded.

The innovative approach to solving supply issues has attracted the attention of the IGD. WWF has been nominated for the Ian MacLaurin Award for Supply Chain Excellence in the IGD Food Industry Awards 2004.

IBM USES DNA TO SLAM THE SPAM

Computational biologists at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center have devised an anti-spam filter based on the way scientists analyse genetic sequences.

Named after Feng Shui character Chung-Kwei, the formula automatically learns patterns of spam vocabulary and has proved to be 96.5 per cent efficient.

In tests, the filter only misidentified one message in 6,000 as spam.

Isidore Rigoutsos and Tien Huynh, at IBM’s bioinformatics and pattern discovery research group, started to develop the formula - or algorithm - a little over a year ago.

Chung-Kwei grew out of another algorithm, called Teiresias, which the researchers were using for pattern discovery in computation biology sequencing, specifically, in protein annotation.

The algorithm helped in automatically determining the properties of a protein, like function and structure, directly from a string.

“Obviously algorithms that pertain to pattern discovery are applicable to a vast range of problems,” Rigoutsos told BBC News Online.

Instead of looking at strings of protein, Chung-Kwei uses Teiresias to identify strings of character sequences which appear in spam, but never in non-spam mail.

Rigoutsos, said: “We have lots of e-mails that we know are bonafide spam. If we run a pattern analysis on those, it can see letters that appear frequently.

“One of the properties of the algorithm is that it will spot two or more occurrences. It doesn’t matter where it is in the message.

“If you do this, effectively you get small collections of letters so you can think of these as a vocabulary of sorts. If you have lots of data to work with, your vocabulary will be able to describe the data in a different form.”

The algorithm can be trained so that it will not be fooled by replacements of “S” with “$”, a common ploy used by spammers to bypass conventional e-mail filters.

The Chung-Kwei method builds up its database of known true-spam patterns and constantly adds new patterns it spots.

It compares its vocabulary to e-mails which it knows do not contain spam. So, an incoming message hit with this pattern analysis will be rejected if it contains a large proportion of the same vocabulary patterns.

“To train 88,000 messages takes about 15 minutes on a normal single processor. If, an hour, later we have more spam, we can add to the collection so we keep on learning more and more,” Rigoutsos said.

The research was originally reported in the New Scientist magazine.

BROADBAND REVOLUTION

The revolution is coming. The impact of the internet is due to be redoubled, because broadband access has suddenly become far cheaper, with prices dropping from, typically, £27.99 to £17.99 per month. Paul Clapham reports.

A superficially dull process called local loop unbundling has been forced on BT by the regulator Ofcom. The fall in price is a direct result of this and industry commentators are already suggesting that the £15 per month threshold will be breached. At the new level many more businesses and homes will sign up and a settling at the £15 level is likely to lead to a flood.

Broadband users can access the web much faster, can send and download bigger files far faster and broadband offers constant access.

So the coming months are a good time to review an existing website, or plan to create one. Also consider how this will impact upon sales opportunities and costs, starting with mailed out marketing messages.

Suddenly a brochure can be produced without print. The cost savings are obvious: no printer’s invoice, no stamps, no envelopes. Instead you’ll have a file sitting on your computer desktop, which you can send instantly to a customer. It goes straight to his computer avoiding all manner of gate-keepers.

Your electronic brochure can be updated at minimal cost, as often as needed. You can therefore include details, which do change, classically prices. The content can be absolutely up to date, addressing new product developments and altered legislation. If you’ve got an existing brochure that is recent, the artwork for that can form the basis of its electronic successor.

It gets better. You can seriously plan to tailor your communications to particular business sectors. Whereas a printed brochure has to be all things to all men, the electronic version can be adjusted to fit at low cost. Thus you could have one version for retailers and another for hoteliers. The content would be essentially the same but with important changes in tone and emphasis.

You could go further. You could aim to drop into the communication specific issues relating to the prospective client, put his logo on the front page or make reference to seasonal changes.

There’s more. Your brochure doesn’t have to stop at written words and still photographs. You can send video with voice-over, because the recipient with broadband can download such a big file quickly. The impact of communication of this quality is huge and it doesn’t cost a fortune.

The difficult bit to predict is timing. Clearly the above scenario doesn’t apply until a high percentage of your prospective customers have switched over to broadband. But the prediction is that, when the changeover comes, it will be a flood.

Since you can switch to broadband immediately, the logical route is to plan ahead, stay tuned to price developments and jump aboard when a serious level of your customers have it, preferably before.

FINDING A COST-EFFECTIVE SOLUTION

In last month’s article, the topic covered was supply chain integration. To recap, it enabled your internal system to seamlessly link with those of your customers and suppliers.

As a result, it helped to increase efficiency by improving communication and reducing cost. Ultimately, it provides you with a tool that enables you to win and retain more business. The focus of this article is how to make the solution pay for itself.

Some time ago, an article appeared in the press questioning the usefulness of ICT as a business tool. It argued that systems were difficult, time-consuming, people hungry, complicated, an encumbrance to business agility and seemingly never-ending. It failed to add necessary, which is today’s reality. Understandably, it caused a furore within the computer sector with many pundits leaping to the defence of the industry. However, the author had a point. Most IT vendors were so focused on technology that they forgot that customers had to use it. This resulted in customers straightjacketing their businesses by using inflexible systems.

The ICT industry downturn post 2000 has caused many technology suppliers to re-examine their market offerings. Their market research indicated that customers were fed up buying expensive solutions that fell short of expectations and failed to produce any real improvements. The message was clear: either supply affordable business solutions that can solve the real business issues that cause us pain or we will refuse to invest.

This is now getting through and you will now see many technology companies repositioning themselves as solutions oriented. Fortunately, it is also reflected in modern business management systems. These are now more flexible, affordable and targeted at solving the efficiency and communications issues that cause real problems in business environments. As a result, they are finally delivering the rapid returns on investment that deliver real customer value. The best way to illustrate this is to relay a real life example of where Anglia, working in partnership with a customer, has achieved some notable commercial gains in a supply chain situation.

A designer and importer of merchandising equipment supplied to large retail chains had a system provided by a leading UK vendor. Although feature rich, it was designed and written in the mid 80’s. The system was inflexible, and resulted in supplementary systems being developed in Access and Excel spreadsheets to extract meaningful information from the system. The company analysed the hidden costs involved in the data duplication taking place throughout the business. It concluded that, not only were the total costs of ownership considerable but the system was also a real barrier to the future growth of the business.

Switching to a more modern business management system was a revelation to the organisation. It removed the data duplication throughout the business with information entered once and shared with every user. Administrators were redeployed to focus on improving customer service. Over £400,000 of working capital was released through better inventory management. Purchasing costs were reduced while the quality of products from suppliers improved. In short, the system had paid for itself within six months of installation.

This is just one example. There are many others on our web site at www.angliabs.com. The point is that the availability of modern solutions to mid range companies can enable them to use ICT as a real differentiator. In the information age, this can prove vital as an aid for fresh produce companies struggling to cope with an increasingly demanding customer base.

In the next article, I will be returning to this topic with other examples of how to make technology pay.