Mark Vruno

Whatever became of RFID technology?
August 9, 2007

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Question: Whatever happened to RFID tags? After being touted as the next revolution in product tracking, they seem to have disappeared from the dial. Have they already gone the way of personal jet packs?

Answer: Excerpted from recent articles from Modern Materials Handling magazine:

The imaginations of executives across enterprises and industries, are tickled by the vision of real-time visibility from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). After all, the idea behind RFID in the supply chain is that it would track a pallet or even a can of soda from the manufacturing line to the scrap yard. Adoption continues to be slower than anticipated because the cost of the infrastructure, implementation and operation limits widespread use, especially in the supply chain. Most solutions have focused on locating assets inside the confines of a facility or yard or on identifying cartons and pallets for the Department of Defense, Wal-Mart or another retailer. This is beginning to change.

Searching for Solutions
“RFID is converging with GPS, cellular and sensor technologies to provide more visibility and more information about assets and products,” says Mike Liard, research director of RFID for ABI Research. In fact, the issue isn’t technological or cost: It’s a matter of application. Hardware and tags at this point are being commoditized.

“As a company, we moved away from selling RFID technology and concentrated on our customers’ problems,” said Paul Cataldo, VP marketing for OATSystems. Industrial manufacturers, for instance, are focusing on tracking assets and work-in-process, using a combination of active and semi-active tags as well as WiFi technology. Retailers, on the other hand, are focusing on the store, with solutions around item-level availability on the floor, real-time promotion execution and rapid cycle counts, especially around high-end merchandise where the cost of RFID infrastructure can be justified. A panel of analysts speaking to investors at RFID Journal Live in May in Orlando rolled the dice and predicted the winners will be those that offer software and total solutions, not just hardware and tags.

Agreeing on Standards
The first step to making RFID work in such an open environment is the adoption of standards. The EPCglobal Gen 2 tag has quickly been adopted as the de facto standard for passive RFID tags in the supply chain, and the organization recently ratified the EPCIS in April.

Going Mobile
Moving from fixed dock-door readers to mobile systems or combinations of the two is also important. “End users are intrigued by mobility,” says Kevin Ashton, VP marketing for ThingMagic and a co-founder of the Auto-ID Labs at MIT. “And what we as vendors have learned is that the world will not change to meet the limitations of RFID systems. RFID systems are going to change to meet the needs of readers.”

Posted by Mark Vruno on August 9, 2007 | Comments (0)