Madison, WI. – The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded a patent (US 7,661,591 B2) for the Terso RFID-enabled enclosure technology offered through Terso Solutions Inc., a subsidiary of Promega Corporation.
The RFID-enabled cabinets, freezers and refrigerators provided by Terso allow automated item-level inventory management and distribution of high-value products used in the healthcare, life sciences and security industries. This new patent covers the method of distributing RFID tagged products from a secure, access-controlled enclosure and the method of determining the exact number of products added or removed through the scanning process. It is the fourth U.S. patent granted for the Terso RFID-enabled enclosure technology.
“The granting of this fourth patent recognizes the utility of the Terso technology and the innovation Promega had in developing the solution to manage and distribute high-value inventory in a secure manner,” said Joe Pleshek, president and chief executive officer of Terso Solutions. “This solution creates value for companies in the life sciences and healthcare markets by reducing inventory management costs, improving regulatory compliance and creating new revenue channels.”
In indexing RFID-tagged items inside the enclosures, the Terso system also tracks critical item-level information such as expiration dates and communicates that information, as well as product transactions by user, back to a hosted database. The RFID enclosures control access to inventory by requiring users to present an assigned electronic access control card before they can remove items from the unit. End users can securely access the database via a Web-based user interface or receive e-mail alerts to monitor and track inventory in real time. Finally, the inventory transactions can be integrated into third-party enterprise resource planning (ERP) and inventory management systems.
