Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is evolving as a major
technology enabler for tracking goods and assets around the world. It
can help hospitals locate expensive equipment more quickly to improve
patient care, pharmaceutical companies to reduce counterfeiting and
logistics providers to improve the management of moveable assets. It
also promises to enable new efficiencies in the supply chain by
tracking goods from the point of manufacture through to the retail
point of sale (POS).
As a result of the potential benefits
of RFID, many of the world’s major retailers have adopted RFID tagging
for pallets and cases shipped into their distribution centres. The
consequence of this RFID activity in the retail sector is likely to
impact on around 200,000 manufacturers and suppliers globally, and will
fuel the market for hardware and software to support RFID.
RFID has many applications outside of the retail supply chain including
some surprisingly familiar ones such as car key-fobs, mass transit
and
security badges for access control into buildings.
It
is often described as a transformational technology in terms of its
potential impact on business processes and systems. However, in many
ways it is a logical evolutionary step on from the barcode as a way of
gaining increased labour productivity through automation. When used in
conjunction with allied technologies it can remotely sense objects to
determine their identity, track their position and detect properties
such as pressure and temperature.
RFID equipment has
steadily fallen in price as volumes increase and microchip unit
production costs fall. With the ability to store several k bytes of
data in addition to the ‘number plate’ identifier it could be viewed as
a form of ‘mass distributed database’ that has the potential to become
ubiquitous - billions of tags in daily use throughout the world on all
objects that are produced, stored, moved, sold and maintained.
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