RFID in the Supply Chain - Guide to Sele - Size

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SUPPLY CHAIN OVERVIEW
This chapter begins with compelling reasons for transitioning to RFID technology
from bar-code technology, and gives an overview of the RFID
market. It moves on to the discussion of economic feasibility of rolling out
RFID with a focus on supply chain synchronization, customer privacy issues,
security challenges, operational and IT challenges, logistical challenges,
program management challenges, education and training, standard implementation
challenges, and what lessons have been learned. After this, we
cover what RFID technology infrastructure is and should be, and then the
future of Web-centric Supply Chain Management (SCM).
1.1 PARADIGM SHIFT IN PRODUCT TRACEABILITY
A major paradigm shift in product traceability began with transitioning to
RFID technology from bar-code technology. It has contributed to the ability
of the RFID technology to resolve tracking problems in a more effective
and faster way, and has resulted in significant economic, operational, technological,
and logistical impacts on supply chain infrastructures.
1.1.1 Transitioning to RFID Technology
This section gives a compelling reason for transitioning to RFID technology
from bar-code technology. The advantages of the RFID technology over
bar codes and other automated data collection technologies are reliability
in heavy moisture, noisy, or dirty environments, and greater flexibility in
reading the tags in a wider scanning area. We can attribute these advantages
to the fact that radio frequency RFID technology has what bar-code technology
does not.
In contrast to RFID tags (also known as transponders), in which a small
radio-power microchip is embedded, bar-coded labels are pieces of paper
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