Barcoding, Inc, an Interview with President Shane Snyder

Shane Snyder was recently named President at Barcoding, Inc, a privately held company based in Baltimore MD and was founded in 1998.  Barcoding, Inc has been on the Inc 500/5000 lists multiple times, and has been named to the Baltimore 50 Fastest Growing Companies.

Snyder started his business career with Kronos in 1986, opening up the first Kronos office in North Carolina and held a variety of sales leadership roles in his 20 years at Kronos.  Kronos was originally focused on timekeeping systems, but eventually included payroll and labor analytics.  Snyder has been with Barcoding, Inc about three years now and took over as President in January.  

Barcoding recently acquired Miles Technologies, a regional player in RFID, looking to obtain a bigger foot print in the Chicago area.   According to Snyder, Miles Technology had a good established track record and foot print as well as a substantial and improving RFID practice. Miles Tech has good penetration in the manufacturing niche.

Barcoding is clearly looking to increase its presence in the RFID world.   I asked Snyder about the profitability of the niche.  Industry followers may have noticed that some bigger companies, like Identive, have reported losses on a regular basis. 

According to Snyder,  while RFID has been around for a while, it has been more of a solution in search of a problem, and that there aren't "normal" type of solutions.    Some companies were doing a lot of "one-off" solutions and that required a lot of costly engineering each time.   

But now, the RFID technology has gotten much better in terms of reliability, and vendors can deliver a solution to company A and then the exact same solution to company B. 

"There is so much human capital that goes into making a one-off solution that it is not profitable.  RFID may not be as pervasive as the barcoding has been, at least in its present form, but penetration will continue to increase."  

When asked about RFID in niche markets, he replied that Barcoding is currently evaluating several different partners for a document solution and added that other niches ready for viable solutions could include delivery type systems - getting better verification of items going on and off a truck - and emergency management - - with GPS overlays. 

I asked him if the industry was benefitting from the recovery that seems to be evident in many markets now. His take is that  "There is no recovery coming, there is just a new normal".   "Yes it's better, but it's not going to go back to the way it was."   

On the subject of consumers and employees bringing their own devices to the world he pointed out that "We have to adapt to the consumer devices that are out there.  We have to adapt to a consolidation of OEM manufacturing, and lower retail price points and we do that by adding additional value layers and adding additional software components to our solution set."  

His final comments on what customers need to understand about RFID in order to be able to implement it successfully?  "These aren't set it and forget it devices"   The big aha moments are what people get 6 or 12 months later... you have to pay attention to it.. have to do preventive maintenance - have to inventory those assets,  have to replace the battery after a couple years and have to adjust the solution as business rules evolve. There is some ongoing cost of ownership by doing preventative maintenance.  End users have to pay attention to the overall installed solution to ensure they are continuing to receive the return that drove their initial investment.