More than a year after its launch, the Brazilian Army's RFID Adoption Program has improved its process for receiving Class II products, consisting of such items as uniforms, tents, helmets and boots. The system was installed at the Army's 21st Supply Warehouse, located in São Paulo.
The Brazilian military commenced its RFID adoption program in 2005, when Luiz Antônio Silveira Lopes, an associate professor at the Military Institute of Engineering, led a project tracking Army parachutes via EPC Gen 2 passive RFID tags. He had been searching for an opportunity to test the technology's ability to improve logistics visibility for the Brazilian military, he says, and began with a test involving between 3,000 and 5,000 parachutes (which had previously been tracked using barcoded labels), to determine whether the tags could be read by a fixed interrogator as the parachutes were moved within the Army's supply center. After determining that the technology worked properly, Lopes and the Army began looking into implementing a full deployment; five years later, the system to track Class II military supplies was the result.
