Are You Ready for RFID?

At the moment most RFID applications are focussed on tracking products through the manufacturing cycle and then locating them downstream at warehouses and retailers. When RFID tag data is linked to a central system, each product or batch of products can be identified by physical location, manufacturing history and distribution path. The world’s big supermarket chains were not slow to realise the benefits of RFID, and a number of trials took place in the US and the UK in the late 1990s. Then in 2003 US supermarket giant Wal-Mart insisted that its top 100 suppliers use RFID tags to identify their shipments, a move the company estimated would save between US$1.3 billion to US$1.5 billion a year. Source: iStart