Zebra Technologies Inc., a global provider of printing products, today introduced the first smart label printers/encoders created to interoperate with SAP AG's Auto-ID Infrastructure (AII), eliminating the need for middleware investment.
R110Xi and R170Xi encoders operate within the standards and sets of rules that SAP has established for AII, said Stuart Itkin, Zebra's vice president of marketing, in an interview. By eliminating the need for middleware to interpret commands between the encoder and the application, Zebra claims it can help companies reduce the costs of operating an SAP AII environment.
The new encoders offer on-demand printing flexibility in the placement of tags and the size of labels -- R110Xi for 4-inch labels and R170Xi for 6-inch labels -- as well as XML encoding for seamless integration with enterprise systems, automatic inlay position calibration, multiple power levels and statistic tracking, all of which Zebra says allows SAP customers to more quickly, easily and cost-effectively deploy RFID-enabled products.
Plug-and-play interoperability was accomplished through a longstanding hardware and software development partnership Zebra has with SAP. The fruits of this relationship have already helped Zebra build products such as bar code printers that interoperate with SAP without the need for additional middleware.
With the new products, Zebra co-designed the elements of smart label creation within SAP's AII v2.1, which integrates RFID technology with the supply chain. Zebra worked with SAP in co-development of the DC 1.0 standard, which defines the messages and protocols by which the SAP application speaks to a RFID peripheral device, Itkin said.
R110Xi and R170Xi are multi-protocol, meaning one device can accept media from any vendor. Competitive printers usually need to be matched to a specific media, said Itkin. They can also alert users to protocol updates when they become available. When new communications standards are introduced, the printer can accommodate the changes with minimal user intervention, he added.
Because global RFID standards differ from those emerging domestically, R110Xi and R170Xi are available initially only in North America. They are expected to become available in Europe in the near future.