The project began at the Chep warehouse where pallets were dispatched with RFID tags destined for Visy Industries. Visy scanned the pallets upon arrival, placed untagged cartons on the pallets with an RFID-enabled shipment label and sent the pallet to Gillette where the pallet was scanned on arrival.

Gillette applied RFID labels to cartons of batteries and razor blades. Each carton was read by a purpose-built production line and a database of product built up automatically. The shipment was then scanned as it left the Gillette packing center to the Linfox distribution center. When an order for a Gillette product was taken by partner Metcash an entire pallet load was read via a conveyor system with RFID antennae and once again as the products arrived at the Metcash distribution center.

All Chep pallets dispatched to Gillette were tracked upon 'leave and return', and only first-generation readers were used during the project.

Murray Fane, Chep Asia Pacific information systems manager, said that while outside the scope of the pilot project they understood that by tracking a unique item, they would be able to identify where process breakdowns occur and where the knock-on effects happened as a result.

"After we read the first five pallets we knew we were in trouble as we had 25 instances in the database and we had another 150 pallets to read. We found some ghost reads and some instances where standards were different in two systems," Fane said.