The Hindu Business Line : Right on cue

Wipro Technologies' retail business unit is keen to make the most of radio frequency identification or RFID technology. It's all about getting the better of queues and competition.

WIPRO Technologies' retail business unit is betting on its radio frequency identification (RFID) initiative and the North American retail market's adoption of this technology.

Put very simply, RFID is a type of automatic identification system that enables data to be transmitted by a portable device, called a tag, which is read by an RFID reader and processed according to the needs of a particular application. The data transmitted by the tag may provide identification or location information, or specifics about the product tagged, such as price, colour, date of purchase, etc. eWorld spoke to Mani Subramanium - Domain Head, Wipro Retail Solutions, on its prospects and plans. The business unit has grown more than 50 per cent during the last year and accounted for 11 per cent of Wipro Technologies' revenues for the year, with over 1,600 practitioners driving the growth. According to Mani, the business unit is poised for growth with its domain-specific services.

Wipro has followed a process of setting up centres of excellence that look at emerging business practices and technologies - the retail business unit has centres of excellence for supply chain, merchandising and pricing, Instore technologies and RFID. The last was set up this January and Mani says the company is interacting with auto ID technologies, working on two large pilot programmes for large retailers, including a UK company that wanted greater visibility into its `customer-facing' stocks, and is expecting to drive the business unit's growth once RFID adoption becomes widespread.

That could take up to 2008, according to Mani, who says that 2005-2008 will see more companies adopting RFID as its value emerges. Last year, WalMart asked 138 of its retail suppliers to be RFID-enabled at the case-and-pallet-level by early 2005. The US Department of Defence too has asked suppliers to become RFID-compliant. The $40-billion estimated market includes spend by retailers and suppliers on hardware, software and services. The market for system integration services and software could be a couple of billion dollars. However, the software and services spend alone could go up to as much as $30 billion by 2008, says Mani.

Wipro Technologies plans to invest in an R&D lab for RFID. While declining to disclose the investment, Mani says Wipro would like to not only run trials but also focus on understanding the physics of the technology. For instance, although the can of Coke has been used in most illustrations of RFID in the retail space as the item to be tracked and traced, Mani says the metal and the water in the can both make it antagonistic to radio waves. "We would like to explore these and other issues in the technology,'' says Mani.

Wipro has been running a prototype of its solution in an apparel store on its campus in Electronics City and another in an apparel store in Chennai. "We have set up applications that can interface with native and bespoke applications as well as with large SAP-type applications," says Mani.

Within the company itself, Wipro is running RFID-based asset-tracking applications for valuable mobile assets (read laptops) to ensure appropriate use (read prevent misuse).

Mani says the company has developed an ROI calculator to let potential customers develop estimates of expenses involved in implementing an RFID project. However, a major issue is that since most companies are doing `slap-on and ship' kind of RFID implementation simply to comply with WalMart and Department of Defence requirements, they could be missing out on the opportunity to realign their business processes and to derive business information from the technology. Another issue is in the absence of leadership in developing open standards, and that could escalate costs, delay deployment and adoption.

Picture by Shaju John

priya@thehindu.co.in

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