Ensuring RFID's Bottom Line Payoff

By SATO America, Inc.

Whether a business leapt at the opportunity to become one of the first suppliers with RFID tagged products or now finds itself currently being mandated to employ the technology, the implementation costs and the potential rewards are the same.

To maximize the benefits of RFID, it is critical to view its capability to drive business process improvement, increase supply chain efficiency and ultimately improve bottom line results. From this perspective, the up front capital costs for hardware, engineering consulting costs, opportunity costs, ongoing cost of tags and, in a manual environment, labor associated with the RFID tagging of products are deemed a necessary investment.

Rather than merely RFID tagging products to satisfy the requirements of their largest customers, companies can move from seeing RFID deployment as just the cost of doing business to an opportunity to enhance productivity and profitability. Understanding the impact of data collection and tracking as well as data integration is essential to RFID optimization.

Data collection and tracking
The information gleaned out of the data collection is the cornerstone of RFID's value. In most supply chain applications, the value comes not only from data collected within a single company, but also from the data collected by supply chain partners and shared via supply chain communication portals or retail portals such as "Retail Link."