HISTORY

         

The latest indication that RFID is becoming the enabling technology of the 21st Century is the course that the world’s biggest retailer and logistics juggernauts have chosen. Both Wal-Mart and the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense (DOD) intend on fully incorporating RFID into their supply chain and logistics. More to the point, Wal-Mart will require its top 100 suppliers to use RFID tagging of each item in addition to each pallet. Trials started in Dallas in January 2005.

As the hype and expectations about RFID escalate, so do concerns. Consumer privacy is at the top of the list. Other concerns include the gap between the vision and the current state of RFID build-out. Function­ally, exploiting the efficiencies that RFID can provide means overcoming spectrum allocation policies that vary by continent and sometimes by country. “For most businesses, RFID is too expensive, doesn’t work well enough (the accuracy of some readers is well below 90 percent), suffers from a lack of standards, and requires a resource-heavy overhaul of supply chain, logistics and manufacturing processes and systems before a worthwhile payoff can be toted up.”

Since it was first introduced in World War II to identify aircraft, RFID technology has benefited a broad variety of uses: identifying livestock and pets; shipping containers; managing vehicle fleets; increasing highway throughput; speeding up transactions at the point of sale; gaining entrance to buildings; and aiding in marathon logistics are just a few practical applications. Because information contained in the tag remains in digital format, manual re-entry is avoided and paperwork can be reduced or eliminated. (See How Does RFID Work? for more information.) The supply chain can be collapsed if the same data is moved and integrated digitally from one location and purpose to the next.

The latest surge in RFID deployment is in the retail sector, where retailers expect tags to be placed on every item to be sold, much like bar codes are now. In fact, the electronic product code (EPC) identifies RFID tags for retail and supply chain management. With RFID, we have the capacity to provide a unique identifier to every product manufactured. The ability to track a specific item, and not just the case or pallet it was packaged with, introduces a whole new level of control over products globally.