Tune into RFID

I do not believe that there are successful applications of RFID that are being kept secret. Success has a way of rising to the top. Any project manager that gained phenomenal success with passive RFID would be eager to publicize his experience for personal gain.

To the contrary, practically all pilot applications with passive RFID have failed to meet their goals, and are either redirected or abandoned. If anything, it is the failure of passive RFID that is being hushed up since there is nothing to be gained from publicizing failure.

I think the 2 biggest limiting factors in RFID to date have been cost and ease of use (i.e. ease of software integration). Both of these factors should improve dramatically in the next couple of years due to the emergence of ASICs that implement a quality RFID reader on a single chip. I think this will lead to increased competition that will improve readers and make them cheaper.

There is also still the issue of cost per tag. This is certainly a factor in applications like supply chain management that require large numbers of disposable tags, but here are also a lot of potential applications that aren't terribly sensitive to the cost of tags.

I can say that in my area of responsibility, I have very good use cases showing less than a one year payback. My company definiteluy prefers not to publicize the solid use cases we've identified. Also, as for the cost o fthe trags, we are no longer hung up on what the tags cost. If the RF technology is "shoe-horned" into your environment, tag costs may end up sticking out as a problem. In our cases, we have proven that even spending $1.00 per tag (UHF), would still yield an acceptable ROI. If you find the right problem to fix, you'll see that tag costs are not as critical as once thought.

Terry,
How long have you been underway with your RFID development? And what has been the biggest problem you've come across? I agree with you that if the business case is right, the tag costs are not as critical as they've always been made out to be.

D.Rensberger, Chris - thanks for your comments. Where would you most like to see progress this year? Active RFID seems to be where a lot of the action is.
Some good thoughts here from IDTechEx.
http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/articles/00000771.asp

I also agree with Terry. If a company can figure out the proper and most effective RFID solution, the benefits of ROI will show up more quickly. Here is an article that Beth Bacheldor of RFID Journal wrote on a company who implemented a UHF RFID solution as well: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/3690/1/1/

The company expected to have a positive ROI within the first five months of implementation. They were able to use the right combination of RFID technology to increase efficiency while spending the least amount of money.

I believe that the majority of RFID applications can yield a positive ROI. But, that is not the question. The questions should be "Can you get the same ROI by using Bar Codes?". For most applications the answer is YES. This is especially true for Passive RFID. The performance of Passive RFID has been over-hyped and confused with that of Active RFID. There, simply, is not enough difference in performance between Passive RFID, and Bar Codes to justify the additional cost.