British retailer Tesco is rolling out a new RFID solution, and the modest scope of the project may be a signal that RFID's role in the supply chain is changing.

Paul Cataldo, vice president of marketing for OATSystems described Tesco's system to Modern: Instead of tagging cartons and containers, Tesco is putting a passive RFID tag on roll cages. Containers are loaded onto the cages, and then the cages are rolled through the store as inventory is put away on shelves.

The RFID tag is little more than an electronic license plate that identifies a specific roll cage. The system, however, knows what cage is destined for which store.

“If someone tries to load a cage on the wrong truck, a local display alerts the operator, who can take a corrective action,” Cataldo explains. An RFID reader at the store acts as a backup to catch any roll cages that made it on the wrong truck despite the alert at the DC.

It sounds simple. Rather than investing in a lot of software infrastructure, hardware and databases to track millions of products, Tesco makes a minor investment to identify its inventory of roll cages. The payoff? Tesco avoids costly discounts from having too much inventory in some stores and lost sales from having too little inventory in others.

As the RFID market continues to mature, tag and hardware vendors expect to see fewer sweeping projects and more of these small-scale solutions.

“It's fair to say the supply chain market started out with some unrealistic expectations around technology and adoption,” says Scot Stelter of Alien Technology, one of the leading providers of EPC-type passive RFID tags. “Instead of trying to layer RFID across their entire supply chain in one fell swoop, they're using the technology to solve a specific business problem.”

“They're applying good old-fashioned ROI to the projects,” Stelter adds, “getting a modest return, and moving on to the next thing.”