With mandates going into effect next month for suppliers to Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defence (DoD), interest in and progress toward deployment of RFID is relatively high, according to a survey completed this month by Larstan Business Reports.
About three-quarters of the 669 supply chain and IT executives responding to the exclusive Larstan survey believe that having an effective advanced infrastructure in place to support RFID mandates, such as those from Wal-Mart and DoD, is "very important" or "important."
About two-thirds of respondents to the Larstan survey agreed that customer mandates are the reason they are installing RFID today. Nonetheless, the pace of RFID deployment is striking, given the newness of the technology and the fact that multi-vendor industry standards are still being developed for key aspects of the technology.
More than 50% of respondents indicated that it was "very important" for RFID infrastructure to be based on industry standards and to support multi-vendor and multi-system interoperability. For responding executives in the transportation/logistics sector, this was even more critical, with 69% of those responding citing it as "very important."
While the mandates from large retailing and government procurement organisations clearly are accelerating the rate of adoption of RFID technology, Larstan's research confirms that organisations have been keeping up. They have evaluated RFID technology and also identified clear benefits. Specifically, about 60% of the respondents believe that RFID system deployment will reduce labour costs and boost process efficiency in their organisations – ultimately making their organisations more competitive. To date, about a third of the organisations responding to the Larstan survey have implemented effective advanced infrastructures to support RFID.
About 50% of organisations believe that their current infrastructure can accommodate anticipated RFID data volumes. RFID tags and reader systems deployed at various points in the supply chain generate orders of magnitude more data than companies currently extract from more widely deployed tracking systems, such as bar coding.
Early RFID technology trials and deployments have confirmed that the amount of data generated by pallet, case and item tracking via RFID tags will be 100 to 1,000 times the volume that companies are faced with when using traditional bar coding systems, according to Mark Palmer, vice president for the complex event line of business at software firm, ObjectStore.
This volume of data, and the need for precise control and monitoring of RFID readers, requires deploying customised middleware that links readers with corporate ERP systems and other supply chain infrastructure.
While mindful of customer mandates, companies also are focusing on their return-on-investment in RFID. About 90% of respondents said that "a timely and substantial ROI" is a prerequisite for launching any major RFID initiative in their organisations.
