DHL tempers overheated RFID plan

GLOBAL couriers DHL has scaled back its ambitions for radio frequency ID in its supply chain system, citing cost as a major issue.

The company has previously said it planned to put an RFID tag on every parcel it shipped globally by 2015 as part of a worldwide technology upgrade. It said the RFID technology would improve controls over shipments by giving it better tracking information, and cut costs.

But speaking at an RFID conference in the US this week, DHL’s senior program manager Bob Berg for RFID told InformationWeek magazine it had scaled back the plan.

Mr Berg told the conference that DHL still had huge implementation plans for supply chain systems using RFID technologies, but that it no longer was tying its goals to a date.

“If we went gung-ho [on an RFID deployment] it would cost over $1 billion,” Mr Berg told the conference.

“It's not going to be done on a lark. It's going to be carefully thought out. There has to be ROI.”

Mr Berg said DHL wanted to provide more “slap and ship” services in the US to customers but had not seen much demand for it. In Europe the company provides a slap and ship service to retail giant Metro which has one of the only RFID powered supply chains in the world.

Despite the interest from WalMart in RFID in the US, even WalMart suppliers had not shown much interest in the service.

Mr Berg said DHL would not be rolling out global RFID infrastructure simply to improve its own internal efficiencies at this stage.

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Ardmona co-opts supply chain system

LOCAL food processing giant SPC Ardmona has completed pilot testing of supply chain management software from Infor and will roll-out out the integrated system by the end of the year.

A subsidiary of Coca-Cola Amatil, SPC Ardmona has until now done much of its plant management and strategic planning manually using Excel spreadsheets.

However, the company said as its business had expanded the volume of variable factors – from the cost of production, labour and freight, to the various seasonal fruit cycles – meant its manual systems were no longer viable.

After a successful pilot test of the Infor SCM AP system, SPC Ardmona corporate planning manager Mike McCormack said the company decided to proceed with a full roll-out because the solution had demonstrated the ability to deliver a “tactical model to help optimise our current facilities and drive cost out of the business.”

“(Infor AP would) enable us to balance the multitude of variables and averages in our industry and thereby assess the most likely cost-effective outcome of any decision for the business both in the short and long-term,” Mr McCormack said.

The company sought a solution that was able to cover broad “what if” scenarios that traded-off labour costs against fruit degradation and storage costs, and factor in market demand and other economic conditions affect production – and come up with the both long-term and short-term strategies.

Infor was this month awarded ‘Application Vendor of the Year 2006’ at Woolworths annual IT Supplier of the Year Awards.

The award recognised Infor’s participation in Woolworths’ massive national distribution network project in Australia. The project is underpinned by Infor SCM Warehouse Management 2000, and on completion next year will represent the largest and most complex retail distribution network in the southern hemisphere.

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Pronto strikes ERP gold in mining sector

CitGOLD is one of Australia’s fastest-growing gold producers, with a market capitalisation of $300 million, annual revenues of $12 million, and a steady increase in the share price for the last five years. It and plans to increase gold production from its Charters Towers Gold Project in far north Queensland from 40,000 ounces to 250,000 ounces within the next five years.

CitiGOLD chief operating fficer Chris Towsey said PRONTO-Xi was not only able to offer a robust, scalable solution to accommodate its aggressive growth plans, but tools to meet some industry-specific cost reporting requirements.

“We needed more than an incumbent accounting system, as that alone does not provide the integrated financial management and reporting solution required to track and measure quite specific costs,” Mr Towsey said.

“For the mining industry, cost control is critical, as we don’t control the selling price of what we produce - the market and our customers do. So our ability to increase profit margins is based on our ability to control exploration and production costs,” he said.

“PRONTO-Xi offered two appealing features; the ability to handle laboratory assays and quality control data - that is, chemical analysis, and reporting exploration costs against tenements which is a very unusual activity for business software producers.”

CitiGOLD has selected a range of PRONTO-Xi modules including Financials, Distribution, Project Costing Management, Payroll, Screen Customiser and Faxmail.

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