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Volume 4, Number 9 -- March 2, 2004

PeopleSoft Announces RFID Software As Target Issues Mandate


by Alex Woodie

The market for radio frequency identification (RFID) technology received another boost last month, when retailer Target followed Wal-Mart's lead in requiring its largest suppliers to start using RFID tags next year. PeopleSoft also announced an expanded partnership with Data Systems International to develop RFID solutions for the PeopleSoft Enterprise and EnterpriseOne (formerly J.D. Edwards OneWorld) ERP applications, which will ship this quarter.

Two weeks ago Target's chief information officer, Paul Singer, sent a letter to the company's suppliers informing them of the new RFID requirement. The Minneapolis, Minnesota, company, which is the fourth largest retailer in the United States behind Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Kroger, wants its largest suppliers to begin using RFID tags at the pallet and case level in late spring 2005. By spring 2007, all of Target's suppliers will be required to use RFID tags.

RFID technology is gaining widespread momentum in the consumer processed goods industry as a replacement for the ubiquitous barcode. Much more data about the goods can be burned onto a 15-to-20-cent RFID tag, using the Electronic Product Code (EPC) standard, than can be related in a barcode, using the Universal Product Code (UPC) standard. And with unmanned RFID scanners monitoring the movement of goods at doors and loading bays, companies would no longer need to employ workers to walk around warehouses with wireless barcode scanners.

ERP and supply chain planning and execution software vendors are eager to help companies in the consumer processed goods industry to become leaner through Internet-enabled RFID. Proponents of the technology say a fully integrated RFID implementation could enable retailers and distributors to track goods with unprecedented real-time accuracy and to reduce inventory kept on hand by up to 25 percent, thereby saving billions of dollars in real estate. The increased transparency of consumer demand would also be a boon for planners on both ends of the supply chain.

Wal-Mart's 2003 mandate for its top 100 suppliers to begin using EPC tags at the pallet and case level suddenly put the spotlight on RFID, which had been used for years to track cattle and railcars and to speed motorists through gas station checkouts and toll booths. Wal-Mart relishes its role as an early adopter of new technology, as attested to by the requirements it's made in recent years for suppliers to send EDI documents over the Internet using the AS2 standard, and for suppliers to begin using the UCCnet GLOBALregistry to eliminate product data inaccuracies. In the case of UCCnet, Wal-Mart's lead is being followed by Home Depot, Lowe's, and Ace. Some industry groups say it’s only a matter of time before leaders in other industries make their own RFID mandates.

PeopleSoft, which acquired OS/400 ERP juggernaut J.D. Edwards last year, is one of the software vendors angling to serve an expected boom in demand for RFID hardware, software, and services as a result of retailer mandates. At the Manufacturing Week 2004 conference in Chicago last week, the Pleasanton, California, company announced its plan to start shipping RFID software for its flagship Enterprise and JDE-based EnterpriseOne applications in the second quarter of this year.

Les Wyatt, general manager of PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne, says emerging RFID requirements are changing the economics of supply chain management. "The potential for improved business processes, better control over inventory, cost savings, and efficiencies are significant," he says.

PeopleSoft's RFID strategy hinges on its partnerships with supply chain software maker Manhattan Associates; High Jump Software, which develops an RFID-enabled supply chain execution system that runs on Windows; and Data Systems International, a large iSeries reseller that also sells a line of scanners and automated data collection middleware.

Data Systems International says that its dcLINK suite of data collection products will support both the EnterpriseOne and World suites of JDE software, as well as PeopleSoft's flagship Enterprise software.

The Overland Park, Kansas, company says dcLINK is the first RFID solution available for EnterpriseOne and World that supports the required EPC Class1, Generation 2 standards that Wal-Mart is pushing. The capability to simultaneously support both traditional barcodes and RFID tags on a single scanning device is another feature that Data Systems International says will be important to its customers.

In other RFID news, Alien Technology announced the availability of a new RFID reader last week, which the company claims is faster and more sensitive than previous versions. The ALR-9780 EPC Class 1-compliant RFID reader's four read-write antennas deliver significant performance increases over current models, the company claims.

A California state senator also introduced a new bill last week that would require users of RFID technology to implement certain safeguards in order to protect people's privacy. Senator Debra Bowen Senate Bill 1834 would require companies to ensure that RFID tags are destroyed before consumers leave a store. It would also require businesses or governments to require consent from consumers before using RFID to track or collect information about them, and to notify people that they're using RFID technology that could track and collect information about them.

Sponsored By
ARCAD

ARCAD Software:
Optimizes your software supply chain across multi-platforms

THE PROBLEM

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A large number of iSeries customers, if not all, work not only with native development but also with many other development platforms such as Windows, UNIX and more recently Linux. These applications are very often connected with the database or other iSeries objects. This brings with it many problems, all related to the complexity of administrating heterogeneous environments:

  • Is it possible to manage all developments centrally?
  • Can we implement the same level of methodology on all platforms?
  • How can we measure the impact of a modification on a native component on other external components?
  • How can we synchronize the transfer to production process for inter-dependent components and platforms?

THE SOLUTION

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The solution to these problems is provided by combining:

  • The IBM iSeries Integrated File System capability, which stores all component types on a single machine.
  • The ARCAD-Skipper suite to catalog all components, native and heterogeneous, and all changes to components, according to the same methodology.

At ARCAD Software, our mission is to provide concrete and workable solutions for iSeries centric software configuration management. Initiated twelve years ago, the ARCAD Software solutions benefit from a totally innovative approach and a unique architecture.

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AN INTEGRATED APPROACH

Putting in place a change management toolset is a prerequisite for evolving an information system with maximum productivity and security. But alone it is still far from sufficient, a cross reference tool is both complementary, and indispensable to the developer. The two requirements are closely linked. ARCAD Software is the only vendor to propose a global approach to this dual need: via its integrated repository, it offers full registration of software components and also complete cross-referencing down to the field level and the source lines.

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A UNIQUE INFORMATION SOURCE

Supported by the ARCAD-Open Repository, ARCAD-Skipper brings to the developer both a constant information source and a controlled structure. It offers:

  • An high-granularity impact analysis system,
  • Up to 100% automation of compilation phases.

Furthermore, the repository will also be used to carry out automatic integrity checks on versions. The consistency of relations such as source/object, file/program, COPY clause/program is automatically checked before any transfer to test or transfer to production. In the same way, ARCAD will check relations with IFS components. Thus, even in a multi-platform configuration, it is possible to guarantee the same level of consistency.

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A TOTALLY MULTI-PLATFORM APPROACH

Thanks to the invaluable operating system advance, the Integrated File System (IFS), you can transform your iSeries platform into a "sentry", securing your entire application set. ARCAD-Skipper uses the IFS as the foundation for its version management functions. This approach guarantees:

  • Referencing of your entire set of software components (iSeries, Windows, UNIX/Linux) in a single and shared repository,
  • Physical security of components,
  • Versioning of components with integrated archiving,
  • Organization of the change process,
  • Management of synchronized deployments in heterogeneous environments.

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UNIQUE CUSTOMIZATION FEATURES

Another important aspect of the product is its customization capability. In the change management domain, high flexibility is needed to adapt to an existing organization. Each customer has their own standards and configuration particularities. We have overcome this problem at ARCAD with the help of our internal macro language. This internal language is unique in the market. All transfer to test and transfer to production processes, and also distribution and installation on remote machines, are defined in the form of macro-commands. Standard macros are provided with the product and can be adapted to the customer's particular needs.

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SIMPLE TO IMPLEMENT

At the same time as being highly customizable, ARCAD-Skipper is extremely simple to put in place. This is achieved by delivering with the product a complete pre-configuration corresponding to the large majority of customer needs.


STRONG POINTS AND BENEFITS

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Integration

One of the major characteristics of the ARCAD-Skipper suite is to offer at the same time a functional and a technical view of the information system. In this way it brings both security to the change cycle of software components, and also complete control over the knowledge of an information system. Being totally integrated in this way, ARCAD-Skipper reaps the benefits of any integrated product:

  • Total consistency and non-redundancy of its database,
  • A single and consistent user interface,

Reliability

It is not worth spending large sums of money to ensure high availability in terms of hardware and data if, at the same time, we cannot guarantee high availability of the application itself. ARCAD-Skipper acts as the guarantor of this high application availability.

Consistency

ARCAD-Skipper allows software change to be tackled in a more controlled and systematic manner. The integration, even temporary, of new team members will not destabilize the project, since successive developers working on the IS will all work in the same structured methodological framework.


A PROGRESSIVE SOLUTION

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ARCAD-Skipper is an open solution that can be complemented by other software suites in our range:

ARCAD-Observer: application MINING and retro-documentation

This suite offers a toolkit to facilitate the understanding of the internal architecture of your applications, and allows the same information to be synthesized into technical documentation. It ensures methodology in the update of this documentation, thanks to an integrated project management and the identification of modified components.
The documents in HTML format can be transferred to an intranet for easy sharing.

ARCAD-Observer is an indispensable and complementary tool to the ARCAD-Skipper change management solution.

ARCAD-Customer: management of technical support, 100% internet/intranet

ARCAD-Customer will increase the efficiency to your technical support, as it is the first Help-Desk solution to be both intranet/internet and oriented towards application maintenance. Thanks to its integration with the ARCAD-Skipper version management, you can fully customize your communication with users. With ARCAD-Customer, interaction with users becomes transparent.
This product benefits from original features such as preventive maintenance and "patch" management.

ARCAD-Qualifier: Control of test phases

This suite consists of three solutions key to the success of your application testing:

  • A non-regression test robot, or record and play tool, allowing the definition of functional scenarios, and the automated replay of these scenarios at each version change.
  • A dynamic code analyzer, capable of revealing which parts of the code have not been tested, and ensuring that code modifications are tested.
  • A test data extractor, allowing extracts of the production database to be taken while preserving referential integrity. With this solution, you control:
    o The disk space required by your tests,
    o The regular renewal of test data,
    o The reproduction of errors in production.

ARCAD-Transformer: 100 % automated impact analysis

This software suite allows you to undertake large database transformation projects in complete confidence.

It will produce a detailed impact analysis down to the source line level and offers an automatic source transformation mechanism

This suite will bring both productivity gains and greater reliability to your software evolutions.

For additional information, call 800-676-4709.
Visit Arcad at www.arcadsoftware.com
Editor: Alex Woodie
Managing Editor: Shannon Pastore
Contributing Editors: Dan Burger, Joe Hertvik,
Shannon O'Donnell, Timothy Prickett Morgan
Publisher and Advertising Director: Jenny Thomas
Advertising Sales Representative: Kim Reed
Contact the Editors: To contact anyone on the IT Jungle Team
Go to our contacts page and send us a message.

THIS ISSUE
SPONSORED BY:

ASNA
ACOM
Guild Companies
ARCAD
Affirmative Computer


BACK ISSUES

TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Hand Scanners Send Buddy Punching Packing At Simkins Industries

MyDoom.F Hits OS/400 Shop Hard, Deletes 25,000 Documents

Vendors Chase the Single Sign On Prize

PeopleSoft Announces RFID Software As Target Issues Mandate

News Briefs and Product Shorts



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