Tag Feng Shui: A Practical Guide To Selecting And Applying RFID Tags

Followers of the ancient Chinese practice of Feng Shui attest to its effects on health, wealth and personal relationships. Practitioners of RFID are equally well served by following the guidelines of "Tag Feng Shui" to place and arrange RFID tags to achieve optimal read performance. Understanding the elements of RFID and mastering the techniques will go a long way to achieving a high performance RFID system.

Through the use case, you will define the business objectives, the process, and metrics for success for RFID. Do you plan to track assets or locate high-value equipment? Do you want to track work-in-progress or improve warehouse operations? Do you want to improve shipping accuracy? Do you want to reduce out-of-stocks? Is your application targeted at containment, addressing market diversion or alleviating counterfeits? As organizations move beyond customer mandate projects, they are seeing firsthand that RFID can deliver process efficiencies with a clear return on investment.

In developing the use case, you will identify the processes involved and determine which assets should be tagged, such as individual items, cases and/or pallets. Also consider the evolution of the application, so you can design the application to scale to future business needs. For instance, the use case may call for reading cases on a conveyor, but a longer term goal is to read all cases on a pallet. Building to the minimum requirements now can make it more expensive to scale the application as the requirements increase later.