Justin Patton, Director of Auburn University's RFID lab, sat down with host Mike Graan and discussed the evolution and future of RFID technology in retail and other industries. He emphasized the importance of proper item setup, technology readiness, and execution for accurate inventory management.

Patton highlighted the challenges in achieving serialized inventory and the need for multi-sensor systems. He mentioned initiatives like the chip and integration pilot and the executive committee involving Walmart, Delta Airlines, UPS, and McDonald's to drive technology adoption and knowledge sharing across verticals. Patton also stressed the importance of open standards and the need for mature technology solutions to improve supply chain visibility and efficiency.

Presented by AllAccessRetail.com, welcome to

Conversations on Retail. Join Mike Graen as he sits down with

Justin Patton, Director of Auburn University's RFID lab, to

discuss what is new in RFID for retail this year and beyond.

Let's get started.

Hey. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening,

everybody. Mike Graen here with another podcast with Justin

Patton from the Auburn RFID lab. Just has been working on the lab

and RFID back when he was a student at the University of

Arkansas, and I guess Justin started the lab in 2005 was

there for several years. Now, you're it got moved to the

Auburn facility, which, ironically enough, Auburn and

Arkansas just played football, and that didn't turn out so well

from Auburn. But hey, we're glad we finally got a win, because we

never beat Auburn at anything. So thank you very much for being

here. We really do appreciate it. We're going to talk about

everything RFID and what are the new thick capabilities in 2024

So Justin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me.

All right, dude. Well, we've done lots of these,

so you know, you know the drill. Sent you the questions ahead of

time. I'm just kind of looking for, okay, we did this last

year. What's new? What's hot? Anything you can share. I'm just

trying to me there's, there's two things that, in my opinion,

are starting to pick up. One is food, not QSR, but I mean

really, RFID and food. The other one is people are starting to

finally get outside of the store and start to look at things up

the supply chain. Those are the two big walls for me that, gosh,

it's taken a long time, but we're starting to make some

progress. But anything you want to be sharing about, hey, here

are the trends of the industry, and the way that Auburn can help

the industry with that, that would be super because I think

this helps people understand exactly what Auburn does.

Sure, you know one of the things we haven't

talked about before, and we really try to, there's three

fundamental things that we're trying to do with RFID, with

barcodes, with human counts, any any system, I don't care what it

is, any technology, when we're trying to manage inventory, you

have a certain amount of physical stuff that is in a

space. It's reality, okay? And then you have some type of

system of record, whether it's a computer or clipboard or

whatever you may have. So all these systems all this time are

constantly trying to reconcile, like, what do we have in our

system versus what is physically there. So in any of those

systems we have to have, we have to establish three things beyond

a shadow of a doubt, to know that whatever we have counted is

what is actually there, so that we can upgrade it to our our

system. One thing that we have to know is that we have to have

the items set up properly. Okay? So if it's a barcode, then the

item has to be barcoded and registered so that we can

recognize it as a SKU if it's an RFID tag, it has to have the

right RFID tag on the product. And it has to be encoded

properly. It's serialized so that we can recognize it. If

it's some type of an active tag, it has to have their thing on

there. Even if it's just a hand count, it has to have a label on

there, like it's jeans, so that the person who's looking at it

can say, Oh, this is the size and color and style of jeez, to

mark it down the list. So, so one thing we have to know is

that the item is set up properly. The second thing that

we have to know is whatever technology that we're using is

fundamentally capable of doing what we ask it to do. So if it's

a barcode scanner, then it is the correct kind of barcode

scanner, laser or whatever, so that we can actually scan that

thing. If it's an RFID scanner, then we have to know that we

have got the right tags in the in the readers, so that we can

scan those things when we do them, or the right type of

overhead, or the right type of robot. Doesn't matter what it

is, it's a physics, right? So whatever that system is, it has

to be capable if it's a human that's out there counting it. I

mean, if you need glasses, like me, you better have your glasses

on, because you don't have the capability to capture that

properly. So making sure the items set up properly, making

sure that we have the physics, the physical capability to

capture those things. And the third thing that we have to

prove is execution, so that we're executing fully. So again,

going back to those counting systems. Did they actually count

everything? Did they go through the whole area, if it's an RFID

count, did they actually walk the whole space? Or if it's an

overhead or a robot that doesn't require human intervention, was

that thing active in the inventory was moved through

there, or did the robot go around, or whatever? So if you

can prove fully and verify that the items are set up properly.

Really that you have the right tech solution in place that's

capable of counting those things, and that you have

executed fully on everything you need to execute to make sure

that that happens. Once those three things are established,

then you know that you have a good inventory counting, good

inventory system. So from there, that's where everything drives.

So from the lab, we have whole programs set up on the physics

side of that's the art program. We have a whole program set up

on the supplier compliance side of it. That's the Alec program.

And then the execution piece is a lot of the data and the audits

and stuff and back and forth and everything too. So no matter

what the industry is and what it is, and I was a long way to

answer your question, we've been trying to firmly establish and

find ways to preach that message. Of these are the things

that you have to keep your eye on the ball if you want to make

sure that your system works. And the nice thing is, in all these

systems, you can independently monitor those, and there's ways

to independently monitor those. So that's how we build

confidence and consistency and counts and make sure that

everything's is the way it's supposed to be.

That's great perspective, and that's really

helpful. The challenge becomes, if you're a pure play retailer,

you could probably leverage RFID to do that. If you're a great,

big mass merchandiser, you're going to have RFID, you're going

to have scanning, you're going to have computer vision, you're

going to have all these other stuff. How in the world to put

all that together? That, to me, is the trick of that, because

every single item will have to have some signal that says,

Here, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. They could be different

across the big retailer, like a Walmart or a Target or something

like that. How do you combine all that stuff together? That,

to me, is the hard part. This

is, this is a key point, I think, with these multi

sensor systems, is we do not talk enough, and we still have

not crossed that hump into true serialized inventory. So like we

are operating in a world where we are all wandering around in a

fog of our uncertainty when it comes to inventory, and I'm not

talking about warehouses or restaurants or retail stores.

I'm just talking about life. I mean, if you look around your

office or look around your house, and I I'm fond of saying

this to people like you, ask somebody, how many pair of shoes

do you own? Nine people out 10 can't answer. One lady did

answer very directly. She had a very detailed inventory of

everything she owned was very impressive, but, but most

people, they don't know. They don't know how many shoes they

have. You know how many plates you have. You know how many

tools you have in your garage. If anybody's ever lived through

any kind of a catastrophic event like a flood or a fire, you know

how hard it is to deal with the insurance company, because most

people just don't know what we have. How many times if y'all

bought stuff because that you already have at home, because

you forgot you got it, whether it's a tool or a socket or

something else too. And, and we live in a world of of

uncertainty when it comes to the things that are around us, and

we're used to it. And, you know, we carry that into all the

aspects of our lives, to whether it's a work or whatever it may

be and and the reality is, I don't know. It doesn't not

matter what your job is. Even if your job is working from a

laptop, from home, you have an inventory like you have at least

a laptop or a computer, or a pencil or pen or something like

that too. So we are not to the point yet to where we are

applying a specific identity to all of those items. Once we do,

it does not matter what type of sensor you apply to it does not

matter if you use a computer vision, it does not matter if

you're using RFID, barcode, nothing, serial number, as long

as it's able to reconcile back to one specific item, then we're

dealing in a world of specificity. And then it's not

just a matter of groups of things appear and disappear.

It's a matter of individual items that we're tracking

through and and really, at its fundamental core, most of what

we're doing here, Mike, is it's not technology, it's accounting,

right? So it's changing accounting standards and

practices, which a lot of people are very familiar with, if

they've ever tried to do annualized inventory audits for

their financial reporting or anything like that too. But it's

just a different way of of counting things, more so than a

different all the technologies that you see on the surface.

Yeah, we, we have not posted it yet, but we had a

really good conversation with Joe Cole, Vice President of

asset protection with Macy's and Randy Dunn from Zebra, who's

been literally looking at asset protection and from sensor Matic

and a zebra perspective for a long time. One of the things

that we talked about is combining technologies together

for a single item, and the use case was using RFID for asset

protection. Literally, you can measure what went through the

register versus what left the store. The problem is that most

people are saying, Here's what left the register at a G 10

level, so at UPC level, if you will, what left the store is at

a serialized level. So five. Got sold. 10 left the store. Five of

them probably got taken for whatever reason. But you can't

tell me which five, right? And so we started talking about,

well, I know you and I've talked about, potentially, every single

item maybe have a different signal, one being RFID and one

being a GS, one, 2d, barcode. The key is, they've got to have

the same serial number. We're going to have a chaos, right?

Complete chaos. But do you see more of that happening where we

literally have, you know, redundant signals for a single

item that help capture it at different points in the supply chain?

Yeah, we're getting there. And I think you

see people coming in from different angles that don't even

realize. So, you know, GS one talks about sunrise, which is

their concept of moving us over to they've kind of changed the

wording on a little bit, but some type of a 2d data matrix or

identifier, moving away from a direct 1d bar code, I kind of

like to strengthen the messaging to like, we're looking for a

serialized inventory future. So in the world you're describing,

Puma was the first company, I think, to fully integrate their

2d barcode with their RFID tag. Now, Nike and under armor and

others in the past have done a good job of linking the 2d bar

codes, or the QR codes, or the anti counterfeiting identifiers,

with the SG 10 on the RFID tag and the UPC. My understanding is

that Puma is the first one that has actually has the same SG 10

on the 2d bar code that's on that particular product and that

that is fully linked on the back end, so that no matter which way

you pull those, you're going to pull the same number back off of

that item. And then we've got other people are going on that

same path. So, you know, two drivers for sunrise, PNG was

been a big driver of that. You know, a lot of png products you

picked up and, you know, and love so well, Mike, you'll start

seeing QR codes on the back of those. Coca Cola is driving some

of that too, Pepsi. Pepsi, for sure, Pepsi, and they're not

serialized yet, right? We're heading down that road of we all

see where this is going quickly. So we don't matter how we get

there, whatever puts that identity on there first at a per

unit level is fine, as long as all those sensors are using it

appropriately and consistently and and it really makes it very

easy to see the future when it comes to technology a lot of

ways, because you deal with this too. And I see this every day. I

got people asking me about 57 new technologies and, and you

know, a lot of them are data services. The first question you

can ask yourself, the easy one, and what's going to stick and

what's not, is it a proprietary numbering system? It's out. It's

not gonna happen. So if it's if it's on open standards, great,

even if it's in a vertical org or something like that, in the

long term, you're just making life hard on yourself. So as

long as you're operating on consistent, open industry

standards, because you're going to be stacking those sensors

together, the single sensor, you know, system is a thing of the

past. And the second thing that people, we ask people when

they're evaluating a new technology, if they tell you

that they're replacing or competing with another

technology, again, they missed a point. It's out, I don't know

how many times we've gone to like a POS system or something

like that, and we say, Oh, we're doing this. They say, God, we

don't need that. We already have that with some RFID. We already

have that with CV. I said, if you think that you are going to

do this with one sensor, then you missed the point. Whole

point is to have multiple sensor confirmation on a serialized

unit level identity. We start stacking that confidence layer

on there, and then that's the true, flexible future I guess.

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So Auburn University, specifically the

RFID lab, led an initiative in 2018 which I was absolutely

thrilled to be part of called chip and integration pilot, and

it was a nice way of saying as we've really leveraged RFID and

serialized data at the store level to know what we have and

where is located. For the most part, we're almost going back to

2005 when we started RFID at Walmart, which is tracking

things throughout the supply chain, and the business drivers

were basically claims, elimination, product

authentication and shrink. Those numbers were out there, and they

were huge, and we were looking at EPCIS and blockchain and all

that kind of stuff. We fast forward to 20. 24 I think both

of us would agree we haven't made as much progress as we

would like to, but it feels like the industry is very primed to

be starting to take advantage of some of this due capability.

Where do you think this is really, really because it's an

incredible concept, but it's also extremely difficult to do.

Yeah, I haven't. I've thought about this a lot

like the tags are there on a lot a large segment of the supply

chain. There's a lot of stuff that's been tagged for a very,

very long time. And, you know, we have opportunities to have

been leveraging those within DC and supply chain operations that

are often people just don't avail themselves of but I also

know that, like, I don't mean to single anybody out in

particular, but if you go to a lot of DCs, the way that we run

DCS is not modern a lot. I mean, you'll see a lot of barcode

scanners, and you hear about ws systems and things like that

too. But, uh, we don't tend to mess with DCS and then covid,

even though it uncovered a lot of, you know, holes in supply

chain, I think what it really did is make a lot of people

turtle down and say, Hey, let's just get a process we know and

love and stick with it, and then, you know, just force our

way through when it comes to the labor component of that. So I

think we're starting to see some forward thinking suppliers that

are really kind of getting a handle on that polo and Ralph

Lauren, you know, jockey, and some of the others too. Haynes,

like a lot of folks on the apparel side, they're they're

pushing volume that are really interested in it, that are

starting to develop those solutions. But I also think

that, uh, we're suffering from a lack of mature technic

technology solutions in the supply chain, especially in the

RFID world, and even in the CV world too. I think it's, it's

the wheel, right? Like you said, we started in oh five with all

this case and pallet level stuff, and a lot of that went

away, and now we're coming back to it. But the tech is been so

store focused. I mean, if you want to do RFID in a retail

store right now. You go buy yourself a handheld, and you

start cycle counting. You can do that today. If you look at a DC,

you're going to get nine different answers to how should

I light up this DC? And they're not, I feel sometimes direct

value driven. They're more focused on selling a lot of

hardware. So we don't have enough good success stories out

there where people have showed that you can really lock down

and trust this tech to be able to transition it from partner to

partner. And I think it's just kind of a lack of imagination on

some of the solution providers, and, you know, hardware provider

space, and then also a lack of imagination, I think, on the

part of some of the product manufacturers there, I see

imagination, just knowledge of what you can do with having unit

level visibility and trust that this is going to be something

besides something that your retail customer asked you to do

as a cost of business. How do they embrace it? Start using it

to enhance their their operational value?

Yeah, well, the demo you had built at the lab, and

I'm not sure if it's still up and running or not, but the chip

demo that you had in the lab opened a lot of people's eyes

about what the opportunity was. Man, if I transmit serialized

data. And I shipped 20 pairs of jeans that I you ordered, and I

ship them all. And you come back and go, I only got 10. I'm going

to claim them. You go, nope. Here's the 20 I sent you. Here's

the license plates, the serial numbers of each one of them. I'm

not paying you $1 because I could prove when I put them on

the truck, they were there. That seems like a logical place for

most retailers to start from a receiving that Pro, that

product, directly from the supplier, for two reasons.

Number one, the called the whole claims measurement. Number two,

if you're going to find some product that's incorrectly RFID

encoded, that's where you want to catch it. You don't want to

go all the way through the DCS to 100 stores and go, Oh crap.

We got some stuff that's incorrectly tagged. I can't

figure out why, at the point of receiving at a distribution

center, why retailers aren't investing heavily in trying to,

you know, basically, when you when it transfers from the

supplier to them, they wouldn't want to capture that information

and push it through the supply chain. Is it just, is it the

technical issue that you said, or is it just no business

drivers or, you know, because it was, again, we did this in 2008

sorry, real long, 18,018 right? And now we're at 2024 I just

haven't seen the industry adopt what you guys had laid out,

which I think made all the sense in the world.

With a lot of just talking about RFID in

particular here, there's a time component to these systems

that's discounted a lot of times. So if you cycle count a

warehouse, or you cycle kind of store, you cycle, count it once

a week, twice a week, you know, once every two weeks, whatever

it may be. But there's a repetition factor to this. So

RFID is not a camera flash. Where we flash the room, and

then here's everything in there. It's more of, you know, it's a

strobe. So we're constantly, like, lighting that space up and

counting stuff in there. It's it's not a shout, it's a drum

beat, right? So, like when you cycle count over time, the value

of the cycle counts was, instead of doing an inventory count once

a year or twice a year, we're doing an inventory count once a

week, once every two weeks, so we get a lot of different shots

at these items, and I think that helps increase confidence,

because going back to those three things we talked about

with supplier execution, the store execution, and then also

the Technology Readiness, the more you repeat those, the

better you can build confidence in those. I think one of the

issues we've had at the DC is that we don't have mature

systems for receiving. Yet, even at the store, a lot of times we

treat it like you got one shot when it goes to that doctor, or

we gotta scan everything that's in there, and then once it's

past that doctor, then it's gone. So then you try to match

up a count there that happened in, you know, maybe one to two

seconds with all the stuff upstream, and we're putting too

much of a constraint or a choke on there. So I think what we're

seeing in, you know, especially the stores with fixed

infrastructure. I mean, you've seen this mic like it ain't

about just the readers at the receiving door. It's all the

readers throughout the space that are going to pick up those

items as they move throughout the store or throughout the

warehouse or throughout the restaurant. And then that's how

you kind of build out a mature, full picture of what's

happening, rather than trying to compress this down to a big,

giant wad of stuff and expect that to all scan at one

particular point in time. And I think it does require a little

bit more trust and maturity in all these systems to have that

full infrastructure out there to where you're ready to use it,

because not everybody's shipping boxes of towels where it's easy

to scan at a doctor. So I think that are, there has been a

little bit of, again, it's just, we're not it's just going to

take a while for for all of the technology to get out there and

get enough sensors in that space to where it really, really is

working.

Yeah, and you just uncovered something that that

we've really learned the hard way in the retail space, which

is they used to call, what I would call things like choke

points. That was that word that they use. Hey, it's a single

kind of portal right here. Run it through here, and you'll

count everything. Yeah, it's probably not going to happen,

right? You're not going to catch it all. So the way I've seen it

be successful is maybe it's a term that industry uses, which

is control point, which is probably a single portal, plus

another couple readers, plus another couple readers. You need

to build up a enough readers and antenna that basically say, I've

got a number of times to catch this and establish what I would

consider to be some kind of a minimum viable read point, which

is, I want to be able to read at least 98% or 97% of the things

that are in the box, even if it's really tightly compressed.

That doesn't mean just putting one reader over door, and call

it a good because you may get 75% you're not going to get

anywhere close to where you probably have to be to have

accounting grade kind of accuracy. Would you agree with that?

The greatest disservice that I ever

personally did to this space, and I was guilty of it for

years, is that that doctor portal demo we had down at the

Arkansas lab, at the first lab, and the second one, and even ran

in years like we, I don't know how many years we spent like

staying up readers at a loading dock door and then showing

people pushing, you know, a pallet full of T shirts in

there, and saying, look, there's 200 T shirts in this palette.

And look, you can see them all on my screen. And it came from

the concept of, like, Hey, we're showing how quickly you can scan

these things. But we gave people, I think, the wrong

impression that, you know, the reality is, and everybody

listening, I'm happy to stand up on the mountain say this, if you

were using a loading dock door, the purpose of a loading dock

door with RFID is you need pallet level or case level

visibility? Yep, you are not going to see unit level

visibility at loading dock doors, especially for a large

load of stuff coming down through there. And somebody's

going to tell you, I'm wrong and that they've seen it before. I

ask go look at it then, because I've been doing this for 19

years and I haven't seen one. So I don't think the Detect kind of

works. It's not a drum beat that's a flashing time. So I

think that helping people understand that the value of

nested visibility, helping people understand like, when is

the appropriate time to scan these things, and helping make

sure that we have redundancy and operations, especially in these

scanning operations, as much as possible, is very helpful to do

that too. But I feel like we have kind of focused on what

happened is in oh five, when we were really focused on these

case level and pallet level dock door scans, we took some of

those same techniques over into the item level world when that

was the wrong lever to pull, when we started moving on on

item level RFID, and that became apparent, because think about

this way you it's not gonna take you long to learn that a

handheld is not an awesome solution for a loading doctor

or, I mean, it's not made for it, right? Um, it's great for

item level and on a shelf. Not great for loading doctor or same

thing for some of those, uh, doctors when it comes to, uh,

getting old stuff, too different tools are made for different

jobs, I guess, if you will.

Now, in fairness, there's some there's some people

out there doing it, but they have a different approach, which

is they have a hierarchy. All these 30 items are in this box.

All these boxes are on this palette. They know that in

childhood, parent relationship. So if I read a palette, I can

deduce what's all in the box, in the cases and in the items. So I

don't want to say you can't do that, but there's a lot of

forethought that has to go into I know what items are in which

box, which boxes are and which palette, and be able to do that,

because passing it through one single portal, you're not going

to read every single item in that in no way.

And that's a great point. So there's

discovery and there's validation. Okay? So discovery

means I don't know what all these unit level or serialized

numbers are there, and I'm going to discover everything that's in

that space, right? And that takes a little bit effort.

Validation to your point, is like, Okay, I already have this

case, and it has a 128, case code on. There can be a barcode,

and then these EPCs or RFID numbers are assigned to that. I

don't have to see all of them. I can just see one or two units

preaching those boxes to assume that that box is there, and that

will help. And I think that we, I can give a real, live example

that airplanes. So when commercial aviation, before they

take off on a on a flight, they go out there and they do a cycle

count of the safety equipment in the cabin. Now they're not

discovering all the RFID tags on all the lifejackets and the

safety equipment in that cabin. They already know everything

that's supposed to be there. So when they're scanning that,

they're that scanning off a list and saying, Okay, there's 312

pieces of safety equipment in here. I just scan through here,

and it looks like I got, you know, 311 Oh, which one's

missing? Oh, well, I'm supposed to have a life vest on row 12 s.

It looks like I don't see one. Oh, let's go back to 12 F and

see what happened. So that's not discovery, that's validation.

And I think, to your point like there are some good solutions

that can be based on, like validating or proving that

something is where it was supposed to be, but that's more

about making a state change in location, rather than taking a

or creating a new inventory identity into a space, if you will.

That's a huge way that distinguishing between

discovery and validating is a huge unlock. They sound like the

same words, but they are absolutely different. One is, I

don't know what I got. Let me see it. The other one is, I

expect these things, and which ones didn't I get? And I think

you're exactly right. Well, you kind of love the segue. I mean,

the the reality is, you've been involved with RFID at retail

since literally 2005 since I've known you and been part of the

lab, but you're now getting into a lot of different verticals. A

matter of fact, you started an executive committee which

includes air travel, quick service restaurants, package,

you know, patch, I don't know what you call a package

distribution, basically, UPS, FedEx, etc, and retail, what?

What's the purpose of that? Why are you? Why are you getting all

of those folks to to work together? Are there common

business needs across them, as it's a set priorities, what

exactly are you open to get out of that?

It's a good question. So the executive

committee, it consists of the prime movers and four verticals,

like you said, and then also Dr Hargrave, who's kind of our

academic lead, or chair of that committee. So, you know, in the

retail world, we've got Walmart on the executive committee.

That's Matt Alexander. He's been a driver for supplier compliance

for a long time. And you know, there's a lot of retailers out

there, but in terms of pushing volume, you know, Walmart was

the first one, the case and pilot level stuff, and they kind

of help trend out some of the directions in the future. And

then in aviation, we have Delta Airlines. Delta's been a great

partner of ours. And again, they're kind of the prime mover

for innovation, especially in RFID and and their arena for

aerospace and aviation, for packaging and logistics. We got

ups. UPS has been in the news quite a bit about their plans

for RFID, and they're kind of the most focal, I think, out

there in that packaging logistics space. And they're

pretty good represented for that part of the market. And then

also for food and qsrs. We have McDonald's that's Sue Fang, I

guess I should say Demetra Daniels. Is it Delta Airlines

and then John Bell at UPS and Sue Fang McDonald's. So and

McDonald's is kind of like of them as a restaurant. They're

pretty big in terms of mover, especially when it plans for

RFID world. So between those four, what we're trying to do

is, in the past, we've treated these technologies, especially

RFID, as one vertical versus one vertical versus one vertical.

Mike, we're coming up on 20 years of my involvement in that

space and c1, g2, RFID has been around as long as I've been in

the. Industry, right? So how many versions of Bluetooth and

Wi Fi and I mean, we can improve things in 20 years, surely,

especially from a technology perspective. So there's better

techniques that we have for source tagging, there's better

techniques we have for scanning things. I think that there's

some real fundamental changes that we can make to UHF

technology itself to make it better. A lot of the stuff that

we loaded into these tags and chips back in 2005 when this was

a few million tag market are not really relevant in 2024 2025 now

that we're looking at a 50 billion unit market, so I think

that that group can help leverage a little bit more of

collective interest to drive the things that we don't have a

heavy focus on, especially attention to data and data

transfer, and then also things like driving technology

adoption. From a bigger perspective, we went to some of

the companies that are doing a lot of the back end data

systems, and at a very large data company. We went and asked

them at one point about helping set up some more mature systems

for transitioning serialized data. EPCIS is a great standard.

Now we need to make sure that we have ways to actually, you know,

send stuff around, whether it was like chip project or

whatever. And this person kind of spent a long time explaining

to me why he didn't think that we would see RFID at an item

level on electronics and toys and home goods and a lot of

things. I'm like, sorry, tag buddy. So like, I feel like that

there's a lack of knowledge and education and maturity outside

of our space. There's a real lack of knowledge outside of of

the world of you know, UHF, RFID, and then even within it,

there's not enough coordination to kind of go after some of the

easier wins.

But those four verticals that we just kind of

laid out, they have some common interests as well. I mean, when

you get right down to it, they want to know what they have and

what they want to know where it is, right? I mean, that's that's

true in all of those verticals. So are you able to leverage

information the things you learned in one vertical, across

those verticals, pretty effectively?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we, every time we have one

of those meetings, there's so many things that one will learn

that is immediately applicable to another space that you just

wouldn't think about, you know, trying to think of a great

example off the top. But there's a lot more in common between a

baggage handling and an airline operation and a package handling

and, you know, a ground shipping operation, or especially air

shipping operation. And you might think like you know, if

you're putting boxes on on a shipment from an online retailer

to a person's house, that's not terribly dissimilar from someone

who's checking a bag on an airline from one destination

point to another. So these systems that are designed for

one may be valuable to another. Bag handling operations

underneath an airport. You should have been down on those

things. It's wild. It's like, you know, only thing I saw for

aircraft operations growing up was die hard too, when he's

running around into the airport and not like that. But like, you

know, there's a lot of automation stuff, which is

pretty similar to what you would see in the DC, in the retail

world, in the retail space, too, and and a lot of the hard

lessons we've learned about supplier compliance and getting

a lot of suppliers to tag things, I think are very

practical when you're moving into the food space, because

they also have a lot of suppliers that need to leverage

value out of this, and they don't want to have to learn the

same hard lessons about printers and application and

serialization things like that too. So beyond the real simple

like, just knowledge sharing pieces of like this is how we

can help you and help you and help you. I think we're really

trying to learn how to leverage the the weight of all of those

industries together to drive to drive it forward. I think what's

happened now is a lot of these industries are very reactive to

the technologies available in the space. What do you got out

there? How can I implement it? Whereas, you know, 1015, years

ago, they were very proactive. I think a lot of these industry

are going out there and saying, This doesn't exist, yes, but I

want it. That's how we got the first infrastructure systems and

things like that. So we're trying to recapture that spirit

of less plant the flag and move towards it, rather than just sit

back and to try to figure out how we're going to use what's

what's being.