The RFID reality

There is great excitement around this technology and the promises it represents, but the reality is that few companies could envisage a solid business case for deploying it in the short term.

The results of a recent survey of more than 30 European industrial and logistic companies - conducted by Booz Allen and Hamilton with M-Labs at St. Gallen University - show that 67 % of them say RFID technology is strategically important for the development of their business, but only 8 % of these companies have begun some kind of effort to embed it into their overall strategic planning or to consider their supply chain partners.

The problem is that RFID currently produces an obvious return on investment only in so-called closed-loop applications and barcodes are working without any problem, so we still have a 99 % of shipments using this technology. But it's only a question of time: time for the prices to drop and for the standards to be adopted.

Read more in Strategy + Business from BA&H...