Ian Robertson, MCBS, CITP, Dip Mgt, BSC (Hons)
CEO and President, Supply Chain RFID Consulting
Ian Robertson, MBCS, CITP, Cert Mgmt, BSc (Hons) was GS1’s Director for Transportation & Other Industry Sectors. He has a long multifaceted background covering IT, Supply Chain, RFID, global standards and international large scale program management, and was formerly HP’s Worldwide Program Director of RFID, having spent 22 years in the HP, Compaq and DEC components of HP. He originates from the UK, but left 22 years ago to gain international experience from living and working in France, Switzerland, Holland, Germany and the USA, and specialises in taking on complex start up situations where the rules have yet to be written and in troubleshooting Supply Chains. He has written various papers on change management within large corporations and consulted for many companies in this respect.
Ian’s background in supply chain troubleshooting positioned him well to create the HP RFID program from scratch and drive its implementation into HP’s supply chain in 28 sites all over the globe, but particularly in Asia, where he also initiated trials and negotiations with many governments for the allocation of RFID frequencies and operating parameters. He has worked extensively across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific regions.
His pioneering work in RFID included collaboration with Professor Sanjay Sarma from MIT on the concept of using RFID for Electronic Proof Of Delivery and the use of analytics derived from EPC event data to predict supply chain events and reduce the effort and time required to reconcile receiving discrepancies between trading partners. He also promoted the adoption of pallet association and aggregation techniques from the electronics industry by FMCG industries to overcome the limitations of reading tags through difficult materials. And he wrote the original RFID Cook Book to share his experiences of implementing RFID at HP with others seeking to do the same.
In November 2005 he took up the roles of Global Industry Development Director and of Asia Pacific Regional Director for EPCglobal. In his Asia Pacific role he has consulted on RFID applications and regulations for many governments and major industries. He worked closely with the Apparel, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive and Consumer Electronics industries to form their industry groups within EPCglobal. His collaboration with China contributed to the development and publication of China’s UHF RFID regulations. From April 2009 he was responsible for Transportation and Other Sectors for GS1 Global Office.
Today he is the founder and CEO of Supply Chain RFID Consulting LLC. His authoritative work Improving Supply Chains Using RFID & Standards was published in July 2011. He is also a graduate of the International Advanced Management Program at INSEAD France, of the UK Open University and a Charter Member of The British Computer Society.
