BY DAVID MALONEY, SENIOR EDITOR
AUTO ID
technologyreview
no pallet
left behind
At H&M Bay’s fast-paced transloading operation, an RFID tracking
system ensures that frozen goods aren’t left sitting on the dock.
WHILE RFID MAY NOT BE THE GOLDEN TICKET TO DISTRIBUTION SUCCESS
proponents had envisioned a few years back, it has hardly faded from the scene. Far
from it, in fact. Although the RFID tag may not yet be as ubiquitous as the bar code,
plenty of companies out there are putting the technology to use in their distribution
and logistics operations.
For evidence of that you need look no farther than the Federalsburg, Md., consolidation center run by H&M Bay, a third-party logistics service provider that specializes
in climate-controlled less-than-truckload (LTL) freight. At the Federalsburg site,
H&M Bay is using an RFID-based system to track frozen and refrigerated goods moving through its fast-paced transload and cross-dock operations.
To understand what makes RFID a particularly good fit for this application, you
have to know a little bit about H&M Bay’s business. The company operates as a truck
broker, with a network of over 10,000 owner-operators nationwide. Although it also
offers truckload services, its specialty is managing LTL movements of frozen and
refrigerated commodities. As part of that service, it operates six consolidation centers
around the country (including the Federalsburg facility), where regional LTL shipments are received and combined into new loads for delivery across the 48 contiguous states.
The Federalsburg site operates on a weekly schedule, with freight consolidation
taking place on Saturdays. But goods may begin arriving as early as Thursday. To
accommodate these early arrivals, the company in 2008 built a cold storage area at
