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RFID technology is set to become mission critical to most supply chain operations within the next ten to twenty years, with the market projected to be worth US$1 billion by 2006, according to a report from Research and Markets.
The new 'RFID Market Outlook: New Applications, Best Practices and Future Profit Opportunities' report suggests that RFID technology is set to become the bedrock of most supply chains over the next twenty years, in much the same way that barcodes have become ubiquitous now.
However, RFID is currently perceived to be an immature solution with significant barriers to overcome before becoming a mainstream technology. The report examines the future market opportunities for RFID, the advantages of implementing RFID and how different industry sectors can benefit from investing in this technology area.
Key issues
The report also looks at some of the early innovators such as Wal-Mart, Metro Group and Tesco, and profiles of the leading RFID vendors and their market strategies. Key issues covered include:
- Market immaturity
Application of RFID to lower cost items is a new concept and issues exist regarding movement from pilot stage to real-world use, moving from pallet-level to item-level and its accuracy.
- Costs
Physical costs are becoming less important as the cost of tags falls. However, implementation costs will remain a challenge for smaller organisations and benefit professional services and systems integrators in the initial stage of roll-out.
- Privacy
It will be key issue for vendors to overcome this fear by the recycling, re-use, blocking or disablement of tags when they are no longer needed.
- Implementation hurdles
Many organisations are too focused on the physicalities of RFID whilst overlooking the issue of integrating the data that will pour in from the readers.
- Early adopters
To comply with mandates from Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense suppliers have had no choice but to adopt RFID there are best-practice lessons to be learned from these and other interesting pilots.
Source: Research and Markets
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