Inevitable surge in RFID proves out in EPC memberships
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
The momentum behind RFID is growing strongly, insists Chris Adcock, president, EPCglobal worldwide, who spoke recently with Manufacturing Business Technology. Adcock, who took over last September for Interim President Mike Meranda (Meranda remains head of EPCglobal U.S.), reports that membership of the global supply chain RFID standards body doubled in the three months ending Nov. 30.
The sudden surge wasn't due to a host of vendors signing up. Instead, the increase was almost evenly split between user organizations and technology vendors.
"Companies are realizing they have to learn how RFID technology can transform their business processes, and are participating in EPCglobal to achieve that," maintains Adcock.
On this point, Adcock can cite several recent developments. First, the three major retailers pioneering RFID in their supply chains—Wal-Mart, plus Europe's Tesco and Metro—have committed to the recently ratified UHF Generation 2 standard. Second, it's clear that the scale of the pioneers' RFID plans is increasing—a sign that pilot projects have delivered on their promises.
Tesco, for example, plans to have more than 3,000 readers installed at the back doors of its 1,400 stores and distribution centers by June 2005. Like Wal-Mart, Germany's Metro has based its RFID plans on its top 100 suppliers, and in November began rolling out readers to eight warehouses and 269 stores, with intent for ultimately taking in every supplier, warehouse, and store.
There's still plenty of work on RFID ahead. The now-ratified Generation 2 standard covers only the interface between RFID readers and tags, and other pieces of the jigsaw are further behind. But one of the most important pieces—the ALE standard (Automatic Link Establishment) covering RFID middleware—has reached "candidate specification status," says Adcock. "It's the standard that's concerned with how the data coming through the readers is collected and filtered, before being transmitted to the rest of the enterprise."
It isn't known exactly when ratification of the ALE standard will take place—Adcock expects that to become clear by mid-January—but there are only two more hurdles to overcome: testing, and approval by EPCglobal's technical committee. Then follows ratification by the board of governors.
As Adcock sees it, this is the standard that represents RFID's tipping point. "An interface protocol allows a tag and a reader to talk to each other, but unless the data reaches the rest of the enterprise, there's not much that's useful that can be done with it. Ratification will be an extremely significant step forward."
