PORTSMOUTH – Bar-code specialist A2B Tracking Solutions Inc. will receive up to $70 million over the next five years to help the Air Force comply with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Universal Identification (UID) property-labeling initiative.
Under UID, “everybody in the military has got to label everything,” Joan Hacker, A2B’s director of public relations, told Providence Business News in a telephone interview. “What the Air Force is doing – and what this contract is all about – is, we’re actually going to be producing the labels and plates and everything for them.”
“It is exciting that a Rhode Island firm is on the cutting edge of this initiative, which aims to improve efficiency for defense operations at all levels,” U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, a West Point graduate and a member of the Senate’s Armed Services and Appropriations committees, said yesterday in announcing that A2B had won the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) contract.
The contract award “is tremendous news for this firm and for the state,” added U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy. “It is exciting that a Rhode Island firm is on the cutting edge of this initiative ….
“Most exciting, however, is that the firm will be looking to expand its manufacturing space in Rhode Island and adding jobs here as a result of this federal contract,” Kennedy said. “I commend the efforts of the leadership team at A2B Tracking which has worked so hard on this initiative.”
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A2B already has received its first three orders under the deal, “totaling about 2 percent of the total contract obligation,” Hacker said “Our first order is for 78,000 parts – that’s just a little toe in the door – so we’re needing to expand our space.”
The Air Force contract has two phases, she said. In the first, “we have a subcontractor who’s going to be helping us out with this. But in the second phase, which starts almost immediately,” A2B will be handling the whole process.”
“We are really a software company,” she said, “so we’ll be setting up shop.”
But A2B won’t be starting from scratch, noted President Peter Collins: “We already do some of this work for the Army,” although not on the same scale, he told PBN last night.
How much will the company be growing?
“I would say, safely, it’s going to be a doubling in terms of headcount,” beyond A2B’s current staff of about 15, Collins said. “The project is going to be focused on quality and manufacturing processes, as well as software development, IT development,” he noted. About a third of those hired probably will be working in IT, he said.
It wasn’t yet clear how much space A2B will need to accommodate the space-intensive manufacturing operation. “We’re in the Portsmouth Business Park,” and may look to expand within the complex, Hacker said. At present, Collins added, “we have a couple of offices here in Portsmouth,” totaling about 4,000 square feet.
“A2B Tracking Solutions is a strong company that has clearly demonstrated its ability to support our country’s national defense program and create good, high wages for Rhode Islanders,” said Saul Kaplan, executive director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, adding: “We are proud to support A2B … and look forward to their growth and expansion.”
The company’s work on the Universal ID initiative dates back to the DoD’s release of UID standards nearly five years ago, when A2B “started to develop a system based on those standards,” Collins told PBN in a 2005 interview. (READ MORE) By then, the company was working with the DoD, the various branches of the military and more than 10,000 military contractors to help them keep track of every big-ticket item with a unique ID number and permanent label.
“Anyone who makes something for the Department of Defense over a certain value needs to put bar codes on each part of the product they send,” Collins said at the time. Each item must be designated with a bar code – two-dimensional, to allow for more data storage, and up to 72 characters long – and those bar codes must be imprinted or engraved on labels that will last for the life of the product, which might mean 50 years of hard use.
“For items like tanks, we make steel-plated tags that are laser-etched,” the A2B president told PBN, while items that see gentler use might get a polyester label with permanent adhesive.
The Air Force contract “is really the culmination, for A2B, roughly of 5 years of our technology and our services,” Collins told PBN last night. “So we’re honored by this contract and we believe we’re ready to make it a huge success for them.”
“It’s interesting – these things take so long to really solidify,” he said. “We’ve been working on this [the Air Force deal] for probably a year and a half to get to this point.”
Ultimately, over the five-year term of the contract, “we’ll be producing and shipping up to 10 million plates that’ll be shipped and placed on items across the Air Force that are considered high-value items,” Collins said. But, he added, “putting it in perspective, the DoD has in its sights [across all services] more like 200 to 300 million items. So this is really just the tip of the iceberg.”
A2B Tracking Solutions Inc. is a package-tracking and property-tracking company and bar-code specialist focusing on automatic data capture, label-generating software and mobile computing mostly for the retail, shipping and defense industries. Additional information is available at the company’s Web sites, www.a2btracking.com and www.UIDsolutions.com.
