One of the comments from our all-star panel of supply chain gurus giving us their predictions for 2009 was this one from Simon Ellis at IDC/Manufacturing Insights: “Manufacturers [will] increasingly look at RFID as 'just another tool in the toolkit'. One consequence of this will be continued vendor consolidation in an effort to provide end-to-end applications.”
I don’t know if it will happen in 2009 or not but, in general, I completely agree. I saw the same thing happen during the 1990s with bar coding. As the technology becomes mainstream, adoption and volumes go up, but much of the excitement and “magic” is lost.
This too will happen to RFID, along a gradual curve that has already started. This is what happens when you get solid standards, mature products, user experience, etc.
It’s funny thinking back on the early bar code days, which I was involved in. In the early 1990s, hundreds of people would go to one of the two big “auto ID” shows of the era (Scan-Tech and ID Expo) just to look for and evaluate bar code printers, for example. And there were lots of choices, many of them (such as Zebra, Intermec, Datamax, Sato, Monarch Marking, TEC) still around, but many that are not, either out of business or swallowed up along the way (RJS, Cognitive Solutions, Soabar, Dennison come to mind – there were others).
Many companies did extensive and expensive printing testing before making a decision on what would be the “standard” bar code printer for their operations. I remember AT&T’s equipment group and Motorola both doing such tests. The manufacturers had to provide a free printer, but each company spent weeks running millions of labels through the printers, testing for print quality and durability – at their expense. The cost had to be in the tens of thousands of dollars in label material and time, if not exceeding a hundred grand.
Of course, with bar code printers to some extent a commodity item today, that idea seems silly. But back then, the equipment was a lot more dicey, variable and expensive, and people simply didn’t know. Buying dozens or hundreds of printers that later had issues and either needed to be replaced or that caused problems for operations because of bad bar codes would likely get someone fired. And if you were involved back then, all of us saw scenarios where huge numbers of bad bar codes were printed by companies.
Such is the path that RFID is on. Before long, you will order stuff on-line, and it will just work. I suppose there will always be a level of system engineering required that will be a bit above today’s bar code level, but it will be just another tool in the toolkit nonetheless.
If you have such a story, again we would love to hear it.
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