2004: The year of learning on the job
Bob Trebilcock, Modern Materials Handling -- Modern Materials Handling, 1/21/2004
Last year was supposed to be the year of the RFID pilot project – a time when companies discovered what does and does not work in their operations.But it didn't work out that way, according to Steve Halliday, president of High Tech Aid (www.hightechaid.com), a consulting company specializing in automatic identification and data collection (AIDC) technologies in Gibsonia, Pa.
"Instead, campaigns by privacy organizations interfered with the biggest pilots at Gillette, Tesco, and Benneton," says Halliday. "Then Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense announced that their top suppliers would be supplying RFID tags on cases and pallets by the end of 2004."
The result: industry has skipped drivers ed and gone right to taking the wheel at the Indianapolis Speedway.
That's why Halliday believes that 2004 will be the year of RFID education. "We're going to learn a phenomenal amount about RFID this year, and it's learning on the job," says Halliday. "Is that good or bad? We'll find out."
That's not entirely bad: RFID technology has a heightened level of visibility that it's never had before. That will spur deployment of the technology.
The challenge is that RFID is so different from any other AIDC technologies currently used in the supply chain, that there's still a lot of learning to do. "We have a piece of paper from Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense that says: thou shalt," says Halliday. "We don't have much else at this point. There's a massive level of education that's going to have to be done."
The single biggest unknown, Halliday believes, will be discovering what factors interfere with getting consistent and accurate reads from the RFID tags.
"If a bar code is printed well and it's facing out, you can read it on the carton," says Halliday. "With an RFID tag, there’s a whole new layer of complexity, and we don't know yet what will interfere with getting a good read. If we don’t do the education part, we're going to produce beautiful RFID tags that work perfectly when they come out of the printer. Then you're going to slap them on a carton, put that carton on a pallet, and have no idea whether the unitized load will read."
View All Blogs
