Zebra case study - Canon RFID-badge

Every five years, the business centre of Paris, La Défense, belongs to Canon for three days. At Canon Expo, the multinational showcases technology solutions defining the present and shaping the future. In October 2005, Canon demonstrated the ultimate imaging technologies for office and home use, brought together by the concept ‘See more. Create more. Be more’. Delegates were given an exclusive opportunity to see Canon’s innovative technologies on display in eight zones - illustrating Canon’s key business areas of consumer imaging, business solutions, medical and industrial products.

As Canon Expo is a large and progressive event, Canon wanted the complete exhibition to be as innovative as possible. Therefore, Canon was looking for a different approach to visitor registration. Nowadays, visitors of many exhibitions receive a badge with a bar code as soon as they register in advance or on site. These badges have to be scanned manually at the entrance. Canon wanted a solution that was more innovative and easier in handling. They wanted RFID-badges.

Six weeks challenge
There are a lot of pilots concerning RFID, but not that many businesses already offer complete working solutions, let alone ones aimed at the registration of visitors of a large-scale event like Canon Expo. Canon had trouble finding the right partner, especially considering the short amount of time left before the start of the event: six weeks. Dutch registration specialist Summit was the only one who was able and willing to offer a solution that matched Canon’s expectations: Supplying all pre-entries and on-site entries with a RFID-badge, and developing a RFID-registration system that scans all visitors.

Scope of project
For the project, Summit worked together with Zebra and Simac. Zebra supported the project both by expertise and hardware. They arranged a fast delivery of the very recently developed R4Mplus printer/encoder and this was a great help for Summit: “We were positively surprised by how easy it was to link the printer to our application,” says Hans Kleinekorte, commercial manager at Summit.

A lot of the badges were made in advance as Canon already received a lot of pre-entries. To be sure everybody was provided with a RFID-badge, twenty R4Mplus printer/encoders were on site to provide a fast production of RFID-badges. “An especially good feature of the R4Mplus is the automatic check if the RFID-tag is operational or not. If not, the printer gives a warning, and it tries a new tag. Therefore, we are sure that all our badges are supplied with a working RFID-tag,” says Kleinekorte.

Results
Summit managed successfully to register 15,483 visitors. On top of that, they succeeded in performing a simple, though effective way of narrow casting. Thanks to a small adjustment in the original planned system, it was possible not only to register the visitor, but also to show a welcome message and the name of the entering visitor on a screen at the entrance. And all the people had to do was simply walk through the entrance gates which were fitted with RFID-antenna’s.

“Due to the close cooperation and having all these specialists together, all parties gained a lot of knowledge on RFID in this short amount of time. Not only have we explored the ways of registration through RFID, we also know now how we can easily combine it with narrow casting. And the simple form we used in Paris is expandable in many ways,” concludes Kleinekorte.

Solution technology
Zebra R4Mplus printer/encoders
Summit application