RFID in the Manufacturing Sector: It’s All About Profitability
RFID has proven to be a problem solver for both straightforward and visionary applications. But its potential is in its earliest stage.
By Jack Farrell, VP/GM Avery Dennison RFID, Friday, January 20, 2012
RFID is a proven enabler of profitability that’s growing more powerful every day. Microchip sensitivity is improving. Support services are maturing. Companion technologies, such as sensors, are being successfully integrated into chips. And smaller tags are opening the gate for multitudes of potential applications previously thought too small to accommodate an RFID tag. A tag measuring only 23 x 5 mm, for example, was released to the market within just the past few weeks.
What first came to prominence as a solution to track cases and pallets in distribution centers, has steadily and profitably migrated to heavier industries and related service sectors. RFID applications are taking hold in fields as diverse as mining, electronics, medical equipment and corrosion monitoring. More, RFID can now address many applications in proximity to metals and liquids. The latest technology is enabling businesses to tag products ranging from kegs of beer to petroleum and chemicals.
A tip of the hat to retailers: The RFID implementation processes that retailing largely pioneered are making it easier for manufacturing concerns to adopt the technology. Models for creating RFID business cases, for example, and templates for launching RFID projects exist that would otherwise need to be produced from scratch. Research and investment by vendors to improve the technology will always be a part of RFID advancement, but retailers can reasonably be said to have led the evolution from analog to digital data capture technology. It was retailers who demonstrated how data capture could be improved from a bar code’s 70% reliability to RFID’s 97% reliability, which translates to a host of cost-saving efficiencies.
To the top tier of manufacturing management, RFID’s continuing technical achievements and its proven value in hundreds of industrial applications present huge opportunities for competitive differentiation, problem solving and ultimately, solid rewards on the balance sheet.
Read the whole article at Industry Week, Manufacturing Technology.
