06/28/2004

Apriso Corporation and AeroScout, formerly Bluesoft, have formed a partnership “to bring the concept of real-time manufacturing and logistics information flow bringing RFID capabilities to a new level.” The vendors say, “By combining the Wi-Fi location-sensing capability provided by the AeroScout product suite with Apriso’s FlexNet real-time, event-driven execution software, businesses can now optimize critical supply, manufacturing, and distribution processes for carrying out production, logistics, quality control, and maintenance tasks.”

Apriso and AeroScout offered these details:

“RFID tags open up a world of possibilities for enterprises that creates value far beyond their use as simple barcode replacements,” says Andris Berzins, VP marketing & business development at AeroScout, Inc. “The fact that a tagged item can now be continuously located in space enables the creation of a new class of ‘location-aware,’ real-time, operations execution systems. These new systems can continuously locate and track inventory and assets, providing new-found intelligence to significantly influence an enterprise's operational processes in real time.” According to Berzins, the benefits include the elimination of bottlenecks, better asset utilization, accelerated inventory turnover and enhanced return on invested capital. The strategic partnership between Apriso and AeroScout makes AeroScout’s Wi-Fi-based real-time location capabilities available within Apriso’s real-time, global executions platform. The joint solution will directly address many of the critical problems faced in production and inventory management environments. For example, companies will be able to keep track of crucial, constantly-moving assets such as forklift trucks and tools, where any delay can cause bottlenecks and inefficiencies, making task scheduling and delegation unmanageable. Additionally, companies can keep stock locations up-to-date and accurate without expensive searches and cycle counting processes. “Real-time location data can enable enterprises to realize significant cost savings by ensuring continuous movement of inventory through manufacturing and distribution processes,” says Nelson Nones, vice president and chief products officer at Apriso Corporation. “FlexNet has the unique ability to track the current and historical locations of ‘mobile’ resources such as people, equipment, and containers, built right into its fundamental architecture. In addition to geolocation by GPS and standard passive RFID methods, this partnership brings online AeroScout’s AeroScout system that locates resources tagged with Wi-Fi based active RFID tags, as well as locates standard Wi-Fi devices, such as PDAs and PC terminals.” According to Nones, FlexNet translates site-specific x,y coordinates into geodetic coordinates that allow the location of resources to be determined both within a facility as well as on a global basis. “FlexNet is the world's first enterprise application software that was designed with location sensing in mind, and now with the integration of AeroScout, it is the first such application to support real-time location capability,” he says. Wi-Fi is a set of standards for wireless local area networks (LANs) based upon the IEEE 802.11 specification. Originally conceived for LANs, its use is rapidly expanding into other application areas, such as RFID tags and location sensing. The AeroScout positioning applications program interface (API) will be fully supported in an upcoming FlexNet service release, available in the very near future.