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What's the RFID Reality?
October 2, 2007

A couple of months ago, I had dinner with the executive of a technology firm that works with RFID, who told me that the RFID industry was getting ready to rebound. He assured me that the fizzle following the fanfare from Wal-Mart and the U.S. Department of Defense about 4 years ago was just an expected lull. Like any new technology, he said, RFID has taken its time gaining momentum among the business community, and over the ensuing years corporations have quietly been getting on board, engaging in small trials, many well under the $1 million mark.

But now, he told me, companies are trusting RFID enough to invest more heavily, and the corporate world should expect to see a lot more of these little square sticker-chips in the future. 

The pie-in-the-sky ideal zenith for the technology seems to be something like a demonstration I saw at a recent trade show, where RFID tags on pallets, individual items, and even the shelves in a warehouse will allow utterly error-proof materials handling and tracking of everything throughout the supply chain.

Even more impressive is this article, which describes a new generation of RFID sensors that can detect changes in temperature, humidity and other conditions.  

That sounds nice, but a visit to a food supplier's warehouse recently drags me down to the harsh reality. This facility appeared to be efficient and well-run, but there were virtually no RFID tags to be found anywhere, aside from on a small number of pallets. That's it. No shelves, cases, items, nothing. That and articles like this one about the need to begin using RFID to fight counterfeit drugs are a stark reminder that this technology is hardly mainstream yet. The pharmaceutical companies would theoretically benefit the most from heavy use of RFID, but if even they are not on board yet, I wonder if manufacturers of tags that can sense variations in temperature are trying to run before they can walk. Shouldn't creating a system that is as easy and cheap as bar-code scanning be the first goal of the RFID industry as a whole?

So I put it to you readers. What is the reality of RFID? Is it really on the rebound? Can we expect to see item-level tagging take off in the near future? Further, is it possible to seek a broad answer for the technology, or will the answers to these questions vary based on the industry? What do you do in your company?

Posted by Sean Murphy on October 2, 2007 | Comments (1)