Business Process Flow and Mapping

RFID is truly a disruptive technology-it will disrupt not only the causative way business is carried out from now on, but also the day-to-day operations of millions of people in the next few years. As you think about how the RFID network and infrastructure may impact a typical company, consider this: by 2010, companies will have more RFID readers deployed than telephones.

As this vast technology deployment transforms the way that the manufacturing, distribution, logistics, marketing, and technical organizations do business, a practical understanding of how to deploy RFID needs to be considered. This is where business process mapping comes into play. Although many of the global system integrators (SIs) will charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide very specific business process engineering and consulting, a little bit of knowledge will help you make sure that you are setting up an RFID network for success. In addition, if a firm has hired one of the large SIs to do this for them, you will have an understanding of the end results.

A swim lane diagram shows how steps within a process are organized by systems, roles, locations, and business units. Swim lane diagrams should probably be called baton diagrams (as in the thing you hand off in the 440 running relay) because they really help you to understand how a team hand-off between and among people and systems happens, as with a baton in a relay.

Swim lane diagrams can be generated for the following:

• Strategic business units (SBUs)

• Resources

• Resource types

• Locations

• User-defined attributes

• Subject matter experts (SMEs)

• Enterprise entities

Most business process consultants will generate a swim lane diagram to show the current business process. An RFID team should either create a business process diagram similar to a swim diagram or take the one created already and overlay the RFID touch points. It is important to see where a process can be replaced by an RFID reader, and also see where a new process needs to be incorporated because of an RFID touch point. The new processes usually tend to be exception processes for an RFID tag that wasn't read or isn't supposed to be in a specific location, or for maintenance regarding software upgrades or hardware fixes. You can also add more detail to your swim lane diagram by adding inputs and outputs. If you are the person responsible for the business process diagram and mapping, you should make it easy on yourself and create three primary categories that need to be mapped:

• Facilities impact

• IT systems impact

• Business process changes

Mapping the business processes will allow you to determine the RFID touch points. After those touch points are designated, you can build revised business processes and interdependencies. After those are designed and revised as necessary, you can then figure out where you need to put in RFID interrogation zones (IZs) and what type they need to be-forklift, handheld, conveyor, or fixed portals. Before you can start installing and tuning the IZs, you need to know what is going on in the macro environment and the micro environment.

If you think of the RF field in a typical warehouse as my three-year-old thinks of Play-Doh, you'll have the right idea. If the facility does not have many sophisticated systems or isn't in the neighborhood of an airport or a military base, then it's like playing with one single can of bright pink Play-Doh. This is your RFID reader emitting clean RF waves-pink Play-Doh, bright, solid, and consistent. Of course, Play-Doh is seldom bought in single canisters. By the second day the bright pink, radiant blue, and crisp yellow Play-Doh are coming out the end of the spaghetti press looking like some sludge scraped off a 1950s drain pipe. A warehouse is the same way-you might have an alarm system, an old barcode wireless data hub, a satellite station nearby-it's like a whole host of different-colored cans of Play-Doh floating through the waves of your warehouse and making a muddy mess of the RF environment. The next steps in this chapter will do something every parent wishes he or she could-separate those different RF interferences and get back to those original crisp, clean, unadulterated cans of Play-Doh.

Blueprints, CADs, and Seeing the Big Picture

As a CEO, I'm a big-picture guy. Many people would take that to mean that I don't actually do anything useful, except dream up great ideas-like writing books. Unless you have the big picture, however, the effort that goes into the details can end up being an exercise in futility. Blueprints in an RFID network are the same way. They are your canvas to create an RFID masterpiece. But before you can create that masterpiece, you need to know how the blueprints can help you.

First and foremost you need to understand what you are looking at. A blueprint is a bird's-eye view of a floor of a building where you will be installing an RFID network. The building is drawn to scale, and the drawing shows where every door, loading dock, room, window, and other permanent components are located. Drawn to scale means that every inch on the blueprint represents a certain number of feet on the actual building. The first thing you should do when looking at a set of blueprints is to look at the scale. It's usually in one of the corners of the blueprint, maybe near the facility or architect's name and will tell you something such as ¼ inch equals 1 foot. To make measuring on blueprints really easy, you can use a special ruler called a scale, which has increments in the most commonly used ratios on blueprints. These can be purchased in any office supply store for a couple of bucks.

Engineering drawings are the next level of detail up from a blueprint. Good engineering drawings will take the blueprint (the facilities footprint) and add in specific operational components such as conveyors, electrical information, network information, rack locations, and so on. Engineering drawings are always preferable over plain old blueprints because they save you a lot of time and effort putting in information manually.

The first step is to use the blueprints to lay out where the RFID network will be built. Sitting down at the drawing table with the end users and determining where each RFID interrogation zone is going to be located is step one in both the deployment and the site assessment. After you mark out each interrogation zone, you will look at your facility in a whole new light. You'll understand the specific areas you need to investigate from a micro perspective (more on that later in this chapter, when I talk about path loss contour maps, or PLCMs), and you'll be able to spot any interference possibilities that you can triangulate in on from the macro perspective.

Later, when measuring the signal levels in the facility, if you do encounter any random noise you can mark the exact location where you picked up the interference and the exact strength of that location. Doing this in multiple locations will also help you pinpoint the source of interference based on signal strength. If you don't have CAD drawings or actual blueprints, a simple diagram drawn to scale will help in the planning stages but should be considered a last resort.