Although the hoopla of BAA’s RFID baggage-handling trial last week gained plenty of headlines, for me a conversation with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) showed the true state of where we are with RFID.
IDTechEX is already reporting a string of larger RFID orders on its website, with the RFID market set to quintuple in the next ten years.
And a presentation on IATA’s website under the long-running Simplifying the Business programme (which is not just about RFID) shows that for IATA, the RFID project is complete, and that RFID has now gained the status of ‘business as usual’ for baggage-handling.
That is not to say there are no practical RFID issues for individual airports and airlines in their own RFID baggage-handling pilots, but as far as IATA’s astute RFID Project Manager Andrew Price is concerned, IATA has moved on. It has completed the RFID Project and already issued a ‘recommended practice’, RP1740c, for baggage-handling. It is now focused on delivering similar recommended practices for RFID in cargo and in-flight applications.
There is a conference taking place in Milan at the end of the month about baggage-handling, but this is more to do with the 80% of baggage-handling that RFID cannot solve. The Baggage Improvement Programme to be discussed in Milan is about reducing mishandled baggage rates and offers a methodological approach covering all root causes of mishandling.
For me, this state of ‘business as usual’ for RFID is encouraging. If IATA is moving well beyond ‘recommended practice-setting’ for RFID in baggage-handling, then it is now up to users to grasp the opportunity. Is RFID on the way to becoming ‘business-as-usual’ in your organisation, or is it still in gestation?
Or to put it another way: are you an RFID-talker - or an RFID-doer?
Technorati tags: IATA IDTechEX cargo baggage-handling inflight
