Business Innovator Awards 2017

10 Corporate Vision / Business Innovator Awards 2017 , Best RFID Tagging Supplier & Most Innovative IoT Solution 2017: ProVIEW - USA Omni-ID is driving the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) revolution in IT, manufacturing and industry. We spoke to CEOGeorge E. Daddis to find out more about the firmand the innovative solutions it provides. Increased process complexity calls for smart, simple Industrial IoT-based solutions. As the global leader in manufacturing and supplying passive, active and e-paper RFID solutions, Omni-ID delivers the hardware, software and know-how to get clients started, and always keep them one step ahead. George discusses the firm’s history and how it came to achieve its market leading position. “Omni-ID began as a research and development team formed in the 1990s within QinetiQ, an international defense and security technology company. The team was charged with exploring and challenging the boundaries of RFID. The result was a ground breaking technological improvement; passive UHF RFID tags that provide near perfect accuracy in harsh environments, including in the presence of metals and liquids. “This represented a fundamental shift in the way the RFID tags were viewed and broadly expanded the practical use applications. As such, we were the original inventor and patent- holder of the on-metal passive RFID tag. Omni-ID was launched as a stand-alone company in 2007 focused on developing and manufacturing RFID tags for tracking assets in industrial applications (Oil & Gas/Energy, Military/DoD, Manufacturing, IT Assets/Datacenters). Today we are the number 1 provider and manufacturer of industrial RFID tags and solutions.” In addition to a broad range of RFID tags, Omni-ID also offers a visual tagging or e-paper system called ProVIEW. The company’s ProVIEW solution is an Industrial IoT-based system and offers paper replacement for material flow management in manufacturing. More than just a paper replacement, the e-paper, RFID based tags combine the immediate reliability (visual instruction) of paper labels plus the tracking capability of RFID for complete process visibility. ProVIEW enables manufacturers to control the instructions and the process flows in real time by creating “smart containers”. These containers are location aware and provide instruction based on their location – this provides a number of benefits by ensuring the right parts are delivered to the right station at the right time. ProVIEW is the first system on the market that provides paperless, wireless, end to end process visibility and dynamic material flow management for manufacturing. ProVIEW also provides a complete two way feedback loop – the View tags tell the operators what to do with them, operators can also interact with the system for confirmation of action or QA records with the simple push of a button. All of the actions are tracked and stored within the system. Every rack, item, container on the factory floor is tracked with location, state and condition – which can be dynamically changed at any time to accommodate a work flow change. ProVIEW enables factories to locate assets, provide real-time work in process, inventory and reporting – allowing for dynamic workflow changes based on what is happening on the factory floor, automatically – without any manual intervention. “For example, these new features and functions allow factories for to individually monitor the location and state of hundreds of thousands of bins and WIP -- barcode and passive technologies have been heretofore unable to truly solve. Visual technologies allow tracked items to interact with users through buttons, LEDs and fully graphic displays telling operators what to do with the object itself.” Developments such as this and other changes to the firm’s service offering are driven by its dedication to providing clients with the solutions they need, as George is keen to highlight. “Our customers drive what we do everyday; the feedback from the marketplace is what drives our innovations, and what has driven us to build out our product portfolio specialty solution featuring e-paper and our ProVIEW software as a paper replacement managing material flows in manufacturing. Our expertise in industrial applications has driven us to be a highly customer-focused company. Our customers and partners also count as huge assets to our business – the constant collaboration and testimonials that they are willing to share about our products and our process are invaluable. “As such, we have found that UHF RFID is still the leading technology for very low cost identity based sensing and will continue to be a key driver of Industrial IoT adoption. However, there a host of other frequencies and protocols already existing and newly available that help expand product lines to cover increasing and enhanced demands placed on object tags. “Fortunately costs of radios and technologies such as BLE, UWB, 433 MhZ and other active frequencies (and similar systems) is dropping dramatically. Meaning CB170014