Best-laid RFID plan may be "wait and see"
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2004 6:00:00 AM
The pain and promise of RFID were interlocking themes in discussions held during an ARC Advisory Group conference in June on best practices driving manufacturing performance and logistics operations.
At worst, RFID offers little ROI for retailers, and "little or no benefit for manufacturers," says Steve Banker, a supply chain analyst at Dedham, Mass.-based ARC. Much of the tagging activity today is taking place at distribution centers, "but as the volume of tagged cases and pallets rises," says Banker, "we'll see the shift to tagging on the factory line so orders need not be broken and re-palletized."
At its best, Banker explained, RFID can be part of a new, real-time, demand-driven supply chain—shifting reliance in decision-making away from often-misleading historical data.
While most RFID discussions at the two-day conference centered on the EPC Globalmodel—meaning packaging, tagging, and hardware related to CPG and Department of Defense mandates—RFID as an informational tool focusing on real-time performance also was discussed.
"Manufacturing sees RFID as the means to achieve real-time visibility in the supply chain," explains Banker. "The demand-driven supply chain can use RFID."
Eric Peters, executive VP of strategy for Manhattan Associates, points out that many new applications for RFID are still to be identified. For example, in areas of the world where sophisticated warehouse management systems aren't in common use, Peters says passive tags attached to products at a foreign supplier could make visible the number of components ready to ship.
Banker's advice—perhaps meant tongue-in-cheek—is to procrastinate for the time being. "Go to Bentonville, Ark. [headquarters of Wal-Mart] and say the dog ate my compliance manual." Doing so presumably will allow managers to wait while a second generation of RFID standards are adopted, "letting others be the guinea pigs."
