The NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A) has awarded Savi Technology (Sunnyvale, Calif.) a new contract to upgrade and sustain operational support of the RFID-based network Savi built last year to track multinational defense consignments between Europe and Afghanistan. The contract followed a year-long assessment of the RFID “backbone” Savi deployed for NATO.
The contract calls for purchase of additional active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers as well as network wide software enhancements to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) supply chain, stretching from the Netherlands and Germany through Uzbekistan to Kabul in Afghanistan.
“NATO has concluded that this type of system can greatly contribute to the Commander’s situational awareness in the logistics arena,” said Brent Bingham, NC3A Project Manager. “The RFID air-bridge built last year by Savi Technology from Central Europe into the theatre of operations confirmed that this technology meets the general requirements to operate on a multinational basis,” he added. “Our objective now is to upgrade the network so that member nations can use their own tracking systems for national consignments while also enabling them to be interoperable with NATO’s RF network for multi-national, joint force operations.”
The upgrades include installation of the newly released Savi SmartChain Consignment Management Solution (CMS), which will enable NATO to maintain nearly real-time supply chain management and visibility capabilities, and will provide an interoperable solution for member nations to share information on both national and joint multi-national consignments. The evaluation also found that Savi’s RFID-based network meets NATO’s Standardisation Agreement (STANAG 2184) for "best commercial practice" requirements for asset and consignment tracking, which is a stamp of approval for use by all member Nations. The contract and findings for STANAG compliance were approved by representatives of all 26 member nations in NATO’s Infrastructure Committee.
The new NATO contract calls for additional units of Savi’s readers (Savi Reader SR-650) to be placed at key transportation nodes along the ISAF Network, more Savi tags (ST-654) to be affixed to containers and air pallets, and for a network wide software upgrade to CMS 1.0, which will be hosted at NC3A’s facility in The Hague, Netherlands, where CMS will interface with the NATO LOGFAS Logistics IT system.
Based on more than a decade of providing proven RFID and related supply chain software solutions to defense organizations, CMS 1.0 is specially designed to keep track of and manage consignments tagged with all types of Automatic Identification and Data Collection (AIDC) devices for allied military organizations.
Source: Savi Technology.
