RFID tags and readers made by Savi have played a significant role in tracking military supplies sent to Haiti for relief efforts since the devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12th.
Tagged shipments, fixed and mobile readers, such as Portable Deployment Kits, all have helped to provide better visibility of supplies as they leave the United States, and also while staged for distribution within Haiti itself. In a February military publication, it noted that there were nine read interrogators and two write stations established (with more being added) to provide ITV support for Operation Unified Response in Haiti.
At the time of the article, some 1,200 tagged shipments were on the RF-ITV tracking portal as they moved through the distribution pipeline. As of Feb. 10, U.S. military forces working under the U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Task Force (JTF)-Haiti, had delivered more than 2.4 million bottles of water, 2.2 million food rations, 9.9 million pounds of bulk food and 120,730 pounds of medical supplies into Haiti.
“The important thing for us to realize is that Savi’s tags and technology have just become a way of doing business to track assets, whether it’s a war, national emergency or humanitarian effort,” said Sluggo Eberkowski, a Savi Technology senior account executive who has sold more of Savi’s technology to the military than anyone else.
“The system has grown, become more robust and matured from being able to track an item when it went from one point and got to another, whereas now if you’re looking for something you can find it whether it’s moving on a pallet, in a container, on a vehicle or stored in a yard,” said Sluggo. “Now we have Movement Tracking System capabilities where you can know where your stuff is while it’s on the move. This is totally new to the system, and it’s a capability that’s been sought a long time.”
This new more flexible ability to track supplies “on the move” has been made possible by such Savi innovations as the Portable Deployment Kit and the Early Entry Deployment Support Kits, which can track materials in remote locations where there is no fixed infrastructure.
This isn’t the first time Savi’s technology has been used in a disaster in Haiti. During Operation Restore Democracy in 1994-95, the RF-ITV network was also utilized to track shipments to Haiti. The equipment had been used in previous peacekeeping efforts in Somalia and Macedonia, using the ST-410 tag. While effective, some of the problems in the earlier system included rats eating through the insulation on the interrogator wires and getting access to power and communications at desired interrogator sites, a problem alleviated by today’s PDKs and EEDSKs.
“It will probably be years before you get fixed RFID infrastructure in places like Haiti, but it can all be set up now quickly wherever you are. We’ve come a long ways.”
Related Links:
