| RFID
Introduction Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
is evolving as a major technology enabler for tracking
goods and assets around the world. It can help hospitals
locate expensive equipment more quickly to improve
patient care, pharmaceutical companies to reduce
counterfeiting and logistics providers to improve the
management of moveable assets. It also promises to
enable new efficiencies in the supply chain by tracking
goods from the point of manufacture through to the
retail point of sale (POS).
As a result of the potential benefits of RFID, many
of the world’s major retailers have adopted RFID tagging
for pallets and cases shipped into their distribution
centres. The consequence of this RFID activity in the
retail sector is likely to impact on around 200,000
manufacturers and suppliers globally, and will fuel the
market for hardware and software to support RFID.
RFID has many applications outside of the retail
supply chain including some surprisingly familiar ones
such as car key-fobs, mass transit (such as the London
Transport Oyster card), ski resort lift passes and
security badges for access control into buildings.
It is often described as a transformational
technology in terms of its potential impact on business
processes and systems. However, in many ways it is a
logical evolutionary step on from the barcode as a way
of gaining increased labour productivity through
automation. When used in conjunction with allied
technologies it can remotely sense objects to determine
their identity, track their position and detect
properties such as pressure and temperature.
RFID equipment has steadily fallen in price as
volumes increase and microchip unit production costs
fall. With the ability to store several k bytes of data
in addition to the ‘number plate’ identifier it could be
viewed as a form of ‘mass distributed database’ that has
the potential to become ubiquitous - billions of tags in
daily use throughout the world on all objects that are
produced, stored, moved, sold and maintained.
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