WASHINGTON, D.C.—NACDS RFID Healthcare Industry Adoption Summit, Booth # 4007—November 13, 2006—Vue Technology, the leading provider of item-level RFID networking solutions, today announced that it is now shipping the industry’s first UHF solution for seamless inventory tracking within the retail pharmacy. Based upon the TrueVUETM RFID Platform, the new UHF solution delivers unprecedented item level visibility and benefits to the pharmacy including expiration notification, confirmation of received inventory, automated ordering notification, automated recall management, support of e-pedigree and counterfeit diversion detection, and instant product lookup.
While UHF has become the de facto frequency for retail and supply chain applications, historically UHF has not been considered a viable option for item level pharmacy applications due to numerous technical challenges within the pharmacy. Retail pharmacy inventories consist of small packages, containing varied products including liquids, gels and creams. Packaging often includes metals, and standard shelving is typically made of metal as well. Large inventories within a limited space can lead to reader density issues, where readers can actually interfere with one another. Given these challenges, HF or near-field UHF frequency solutions were considered the only viable solutions for item level tracking in the pharmacy. This presents a need for dual RFID frequencies in one retail environment and requires chain drugstores to implement and manage two completely unique RFID tracking systems.
“By delivering the proven benefits of item level RFID to the pharmacy using standard UHF technologies, Vue has now made it possible for a chain drugstore to standardize store-wide inventory tracking on a single RFID infrastructure,” said Robert Locke, CEO of Vue Technology. “This solution builds on our success in other retail categories, and opens the door to widespread adoption of item level RFID in the pharmacy.”
Vue’s UHF solution is the industry’s first to leverage standard Gen II UHF tags from popular suppliers and standard Gen II readers to track any pharmaceutical products including liquids, pill bottles, blister packs and gels with inventory accuracies approaching 100 percent within the complex pharmacy environment. The solution integrates these standard components with various “VUEPoints™” (integrated RFID read points in pharmacy shelves, receiving stations, countertops, and more), Vue’s RF Networking hardware (enables standard readers to read thousands of antennas), and the TrueVUE application suite (network management, reporting, alerting, and workflows).
“Vue Technology has introduced a significant innovation for chain drug retailers,” said Russell Klein, Director of Emerging Technology Research at Aberdeen. “The retail pharmacy is precisely the kind of environment best suited to the advantages that RFID offers. Vue Technology is making it easy to experience the power of complete inventory visibility within the pharmacy and up the supply chain while avoiding the need for multiple systems on different frequencies. In a practical sense, item-level RFID is finally a reality for broad use in pharmacies.”
Vue Technology’s new UHF pharmacy solution enables retail pharmacies to easily initiate any item-level deployment, from dock doors and portals to mobile and smart shelving solutions, driving customer benefits across a number of areas:
- Increasing inventory turns
- Reducing losses due to expired product
- Increasing order fill rates
- Automating inventory ordering and recall processing
- Reducing labor costs and distracting inventory tasks
- Minimizing inventory overstocks
Vue Technology’s complete UHF pharmacy solution will ship at the end of November. Combinations of fixed an