The Shift to Value Up Front

Spurred by sensationalized media coverage and mandates from retail giants like Wal-Mart and Tesco, the adoption of RFID technology has become a widely debated topic among businesses over the past year.

As newer, less expensive tagging and interrogating applications begin to flood the market, companies around the world are calculating the business value of rolling-out an RFID solution across their supply chain and many are finding a financial case to do so.

Often the adoption of an emerging technology poses a business case conundrum: Will the benefits of an implementation have a significant impact your operations? Can improvements to customer service and operational efficiencies translate into bottom-line business benefits? Business want the value to be derived immediately, they just can't wait and watch or keep guessing. The bottom line is they want immediate result......

There are several reasons for this Mind set of customer

• While the adoption of the EPC Information Services (EPCIS) standard has opened the door for inexpensive intercompany data sharing, data volumes have generally not reached the point that the inability to share has been a barrier to RFID adoption.
• What has been a barrier, however, has been the difficult task of intercompany technology coordination throughout the supply chain.

Within a single company, it is often difficult enough to coordinate between the IT and operations teams on a project, but overcoming challenges when dealing with a new and relatively unproven technology in an interorganizational context is even more difficult. 

So how can we answer to that??? One has to understand that the dialogue about value has shifted within the vendor community from an emphasis on lowering the cost of the technology to increasing the benefits accrued from it.

This, in turn, has led to a focus on enabling applications that would not require coordination between companies, while allowing end users to generate strong productivity gains.

There’s no doubt that the new generation of RFID solutions have already begun to revolutionize the way we do business. The competitive environment will reward those who can quickly leverage RFID compliance to derive additional value.

Simply put, if you only comply, you can’t compete. The winners will be those who can harness the power of RFID technology to their advantage.