Articles
From Pilots To Production: A Look At The State Of The RFID Industry
April 10, 2008
•White Paper: From Pilots To Production A Look At The State Of The RFID Industry
The first wave of Electronic Product Code (EPC) RFID adoption was largely driven by retail and government agency mandates. Early EPC technology was expensive and immature and lacked the performance required for many applications. In addition, the value chain of solution providers, software and process knowledge did not yet exist. Many companies applied the tags and installed the portals required to meet external mandates, but they didn't incorporate RFID into their business processes, choosing instead to wait for real-world RFID success stories with documented return-on-investment to show the way.
Less than ten years of rapid and enthusiastic evolution have led to a mature technology based on standards and supported by a deep selection of products and services. RFID's unique capacity for truly automatic data capture reveals it to be not merely a replacement for barcodes, but a unique technology that delivers a clear and rapid return on investment. Performance gains in the most recent wave of Generation 2, or "Gen 2," readers and tags have made EPC RFID preferred for many applications previously served by other technologies.
RFID hype was on the rise when Wal-Mart and Department of Defense (DoD) announced their mandates in 2003, but EPC-compliant technology was new. As is typical with the early waves of technology adoption, standards were being developed. In the early years, achieving seamless interoperability and high performance was challenging and integration with enterprise software was labor- intensive. And since RFID wasn't integrated into business processes, many organizations implemented manual processes, such as slap-and-ship tag application, which often devoured potential ROI.
The last five years have seen accelerating progress. Two years of focused development by EPC pioneers and the MIT AutoID Center led to the Gen 2 protocol, a milestone in RFID evolution that has closed all of the major gaps at the hardware level. The second wave of new Gen 2 ICs, tags and readers have advanced to the point that performance is exceptional, costs are dropping and interoperability is a given. Software applications have evolved into sophisticated resource and information managers connected to enterprise software through mature, standards-based interfaces.
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