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Microcap & Penny Stocks : SMY - SAMSys Technologies Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: veliny who wrote (142)	11/19/2002 11:48:05 AM
From: Montana Wildhack	Respond to of 342

Hi veliny, I should be clear that I'm not an expert. I have some knowledge but I'm learning all the time. Walmart is exactly what it appears to be. It beats up its suppliers for best price/quality and runs a horribly lean organization. No one. I'll repeat that no one has influence on Walmart. Gillette, P&G, everyone sits in the little cubicles they have for suppliers and sweats to meet the requirements of Walmart. They are that big. What Walmart does everyone will fit into. This is fact. No one has preferred vendor status. Walmart's methods strip all that fat out. RFID does not make a product cheaper. If used properly it can cut out significant product disappearance, product staledating, and reduce inventory levels. It can also reduce some overhead costs (inventory control is less manual intensive and product labelling changes are much cheaper because instead of opening all the boxes to make the changes it may be possible to re-write the tags). Gillette will be justifying this expenditure within itself and may have a business case where this first step is not viewed as synergistic - but an intial cost that eventually will pay off. Your point about "my tags my readers" is a good one. This has been around for years and is the major problems with extensive adaptation of RFID. The other is cost per tag. Gillette in this example, absolutely will fall in line with where Walmart goes. What Walmart will demand is that we don't care who you are. If you want to unload your product at our docking bay it will meet all of our specifications. They have so much clout that if Gillette's truck is X number of minutes late in its scheduled window at it scheduled loading dock - they are fined. All costs of all mistakes or inconveniences are born (and paid quickly) by the suppliers regardless of who they are. This is why you need a reader in any equation that can read anything that comes in regardless of whose tags are on it. So to your next point, there are standards being set by the Auto ID centre but they aren't as limiting as saying "everybody has to do exactly this". These standards are around the adaptation of EPC which is explained on their website: autoidcenter.org Your point about the leading tag manufacturer will be about whose tags work reliably and more importantly cost per tag. Its important to realize that the tact SAMsys took was to get other tag protocols opened up to their reader so that all major tag manufacturers can be read by it. In this I believe SAMsys is unique at this time. In some ways RFID is like the internet. By creating a standard markup language (as an example) there is inter connectivity within the environment. How companies use this to their benefit may be different from industry to industry. In that same way there can be a variety of benefits in adapting RFID. RJR wants to lose less boxes of cigarettes, Exxon wants to make paying easier, Walmart wants to improve product availability and location, on and on it goes case by case. The last point about software is a very good one. This is another key piece in the logistics of having RFID work. When you realize the range of low frequency, high frequency, and ultra high frequency tag/reader abilities and the problems needing sorting out such as two readers trying to read the same tag simultaneously, the problem of reading the same tag twice, the problem of processing all this data and creating systems of readers and software in a large physical environment - it becomes apparent just how extensive the investment is. I don't know if I've helped here. Its not going to happen quickly or smoothly but with the opportunites in the many billions of dollars and the sheer superiority of RFID on almost every level guarantees in my mind that all this is inevitable. The SAMsys price has broken down today. It may be selling on news. This Gillette thing never would have the power to change that price alone. This company is continuing to lay some good groundwork for a revolution that is not here yet. BTW - Europe and Asia as you might expect have other ideas for standards. Global standards may be over the horizon. Wolf