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First published 02.06, page
RFID meeting of the minds roundtable
Experts discuss the perils and the promise of RFID.
Rick Lingle, Technical and RFID Editor |
Larstan
Business Reports, Potomac, MD, held an executive
RFID: Meeting of the Minds roundtable in Chicago in
mid-December to discuss the perils and the promise of
RFID. The panel of nine RFID analysts and solutions
providers was moderated by John Persinos, Larstan
editorial director.
RFID Antenna was privileged to be among a select
few media members in attendance. The following provides
a summary of excerpts from the event; a report of the
approved transcript is available, in PDF format,
on this page at
Larstan's Web site.
Panelists agreed that getting the best and highest use
of RFID—via real-time actionable information—requires
interpretive analysis whereby users aren’t only seeing
the information as it’s scanned, but they’re
simultaneously putting it into historical context.
A rocky transition
The increasing importance of making a business case for
RFID was underscored by Robert Clarke, PhD, Michigan
State University School of Packaging professor. He said
RFID is still undergoing a rocky transition from broad
theoretical applications to real-world practicality.
Clarke said the technology offers enormous potential and
benefits, but it’s still surrounded by unrealistic
expectations. He said RFID technology one day would live
up to—and exceed—the hype. But first, a lot of hard work
remains.
“Wal-Mart has started backing off of a lot of [its]
plans and applications,” Clarke pointed out. “Why is
that? One, the technology, as developed, doesn’t work
well in a lot of applications, and until they find out
how to make those things work so that they can
synthesize the data into actionable information, there’s
just not a good enough business driver in terms of
payback.”
A mishmash of opportunities
A major hurdle, Clarke said, is the limitation of
current technology. “The problem is that RFID physics
don’t always allow you to easily synthesize the data,
and that’s what many companies are running up against
right now, including Wal-Mart. They have not helped by
continuing to refuse — and I understand why — to name
vendors that work well for their applications. The good
part of that is, it allows new companies and new
technologies to come into the marketplace and maybe take
over, but it also creates this mishmash of
opportunities.”
RFID is just not a win…yet
Stan Drobac, Avery Dennison RFID Strategy & Planning
vice president, echoed Clarke’s assertions. “For a lot
of users, particularly the folks that are driven to do
it early, there isn’t a clear business case,” he said.
“So it’s hard for a supplier to Wal-Mart, in most cases,
to come up with any kind of a financial justification
for RFID. But at the same time people can’t justify it
financially today, a great many of them can also look
down the road and realize that much in the same way
barcodes didn’t do much but add cost in the early days
for them, that’s where RFID is today and that 10 or 15
years from now it will be ubiquitous. It will be
something that we can’t live without. And they realize
that it will be a win. It’s just not a win today.”
The big benefit: Exchange of data
Greg Gilbert, Manhattan Associates' product management
director, said that RFID is, first and foremost, an
enabling technology. “For any enabling technology, it’s
very hard to prove the business case,” he said. “Prove
the business case for your laptop. You can’t. Prove the
business case for your BlackBerry. You can’t. But it’s
what you do with it afterwards that allows you to drive
the business value. So you have to build on top of it
and then figure what the value is beyond that.”
Gilbert pointed to the promising results of the early
RFID work undertaken by his clients.
“A lot of our customers have conducted several pilots
and already work with the exchange of the data,” he
said. “That’s really where the big benefit is. It’s not
what you do physically on the distribution center floor.
If that were the answer, our customers would have
already done that, but it’s the ability to see both
forward and backward into the supply chain information
that they’ve never seen before."
RFID requires courage…
Michael Crane, Cisco Systems, Advanced Services senior
director, said that the companies that have successfully
adopted RFID have been the ones with the “courage” to
change their processes. “Everyone recognizes the value
but then depending on the strategic nature of what
you’re trying to do, you’re looking at changing some
significant processes to implement RFID, so it’s more
than just ‘barcodes on steroids,’ ” Crane said. “With a
systematic approach you are getting more granular
visibility into your supply chain and that can lead or
cause companies to change their business processes. This
is a dramatic change and I think that’s the reason that
RFID deployments are being hindered. Do you have the
courage to take that leap of faith and systematically
make changes?”
…and requires mind-boggling sophistication
Joseph Tobolski, Accenture senior director, and others
suggested that RFID is not merely about reading sheer
volumes of data. “Interpreting that data is important,”
he explained. He noted that an RFID system must include
sufficient middleware tools and applications to provide
an analytical overlay, to make sense of the data in real
time. RFID [does not produce] just a stream of
undifferentiated information, akin to water blasting out
of a fire hose. RFID data must be up-to-the-second and
actionable, a goal that requires computing capabilities
of mind-boggling sophistication.
Middleware to evolve
Tom Gibbs, Intel Worldwide Strategy and Planning
director, commented on the practical applications of
these research efforts. “If you can apply those same
concepts to consumer products or pharmaceuticals—to
where you had that sort of real-time demand trigger, you
know that a customer just bought something—you can
determine the ripple effect back in the supply chain,”
he said. “Can you react to that if you do know? I don’t
believe that is a middleware function. That is going to
[require a] higher algorithm created by business
application. The middleware is going to facilitate the
push of the data that’s required, but you have to
remember when you read a tag basically all you know is
that you saw a tag. That’s it. Consequently, I believe
middleware will evolve to the point where a significant
portion of it will be in the reader.”
The most important question to ask
The most important question a company can ask when
pondering potential applications for RFID is: If we
could track anything in any manner that we desired, and
utilize that data in any way that we desired, what would
that system look like?
Elaborating on that theme, Tobolski said that companies
must define their informational goals before making RFID
deployments.
“When they get the information that they’re trying to
get with RFID, many users won’t be able to do anything
with it,” Tobolski said. “They have no idea what to do
with the information. Anybody can get data. We can all
get data. It’s what you do with it that counts. It comes
down to an operational evolution supported by technical
solutions that will vary and improve over time.”
Don’t try to do stupid things
Walt DuLaney, Adaptive RFID chief executive officer,
related how one of his clients is generating new
innovations in RFID usage. “We’re tagging some things
that are supposedly impossible to tag,” he said. “They
have all the problems of what’s inside the package. And
I used to work in a reengineering lab 15 years ago where
we talked about performing different processes. Well, we
can design factory processes so that we get 100 percent
accuracy on this client’s products. Now, what does that
mean? That means we don’t go try to do stupid things
where we try to get 100 percent reads on very tightly
packed pallets of products where the characteristics
block RFID.”
Tailored RFID works best
DuLaney said the key is to tailor RFID applications for
an end user’s specific needs. “You have to design the
processes for the interaction of the process, the
product and labor
efficiency,” he said. “If companies go through that
exercise, they now have a nice, repeatable process that
complies with their customer mandates and achieves what
needs to be done to get benefits at various points.”
Tobolski cited the need for targeted, short-term wins in
RFID to boost the technology’s credibility. Real world
solutions, he said, will enable RFID to make its case,
as success begets success.
Panelists remarked on the unexpected spin-offs of RFID
research and development—a common phenomenon with a new
technology.
Unexpected benefits
“Gillette has talked several times about the unexpected
benefits of RFID that they’ve seen,” Drobac said. “They
went into this on blind faith, which they admitted.
They’ve seen benefits in places that they weren’t
looking for. But it’s tough to get people to talk about
their big wins internally. Nonetheless, we have seen
customers that have applied some of those computational
processes on RFID and then have found the value in other
areas."
As Persinos noted: “One big take-away from this
discussion is that RFID is not a technical fix in
response to mandates. It’s a way to add value to a
company’s services and to its products and to the entire
enterprise.”
·Larstan Business Reports
·Phone: 240/396-0007
·http://www.larstan.net
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