Interesting views on RFID from a consulting perspective (Doug Lattner, chairman and CEO of Deloitte Consulting,)
Wal-Mart is insisting its top suppliers have such tracking technology in place by next year. Target and Albertson’s have issued similar directives. It’s not just the major retail chains pressuring their suppliers. The Department of Defense is requiring more than 40,000 suppliers to have RFID tags placed on containers, pallets or individual items with a value of $5,000 or more by 2005. The Healthcare Distribution Management Association—a national, nonprofit organization for health care distributors—also recommends that the makers of drugs implement RFID tagging systems by 2005. And, the transportation industry, which must contend with homeland security requirements, must now be capable of accommodating RFID mandates set forth by other industries in the shipping of their products and materials….
…It’s not as if the early successes of RFID aren’t already known. E-ZPass and Speedpass, two examples of so-called “passive” RFID technology, ease payment management and serve as ID badges for identity management. In Britain, pilot RFID trials have been a part of the retail industry for several years. Marks & Spencer, for instance, implemented a pilot program involving the tagging of 3.5 million reusable containers used in its supply chain and reduced data collection time by 83 percent. More than 100 suppliers are working with Marks & Spencer on this program....
Good RFID focus feed can be found here
For a techie backgrounder, check the great ACM Queue article
The next major hurdle is not directly related to the technology, but the software systems that will be needed to manage RFID-based inventory control. The extensive use of an electronic tagging technology will generate a flow of product information that will be several orders of magnitude greater than it is now. Database management software in the future will need to deal with item-level references, track product sales in the event of a recall, respond to data recovered from a tag’s writable memory, and make automatic decisions about reordering items as buying trends develop. Many of these processes will need to operate in realtime because tag tracking is automatic and continuous, and the data flow will be derived from products shipped globally across all time zones. Systems that encompass all of these capabilities do not exist today, but as they are built they will need to be integrated into less-capable legacy inventory management systems, a task that will challenge commercial software system developers...
Also some previous posting on:
- SAP RFID integration
- value in the RFID food chain
Interestion European examples of RFID suplliers include:
- Baracoda
- Tagsys
(i'm as usual interested in any other relevant examples...)
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