The Hindu Business Line : RFID tags - an eye on how you buy

In the first two parts of this article, we looked at some areas where radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can be applied, including logistics, travel and the retail space. The third and concluding part here captures some other instances and insights for effective use of this technology.

Counter-clockwise moves

RFID can help streamline just-in-time, kanban management practice, Six Sigma and lean manufacturing strategies by tracking information at a granular level, ensuring verification and validation of processes as well as compliance with standards and regulations in manufacturing.

The EnviroTrack would be able to transmit data not just about a container's position but also the temperature of its contents, switching off for safety reasons, when it gets close to an aircraft.

Wharton marketing professor Peter S. Fader has captured some interesting insight. Here, random lines represent a new dataset charted for the first time by RFID tags located on consumers' shopping carts. These depict the paths taken by individual shoppers in a grocery store.

This pattern indicates that shoppers prefer a counter-clockwise shopping experience. These findings may have important implications for store layouts, product placement, displays, aisles and perimeter spaces. The mechanism to collect this unique shopping data is called PathTracker.

An interesting instance of RFID usage at home, in India has been at the Bhilwadi-based Chitale buffalo farm, some 240 km from Pune, where each buffalo is tagged with a card that takes care of feeding and breeding data, along with the milking record of the animals.

Efficiency on the roads

RFID is also being used together with VSAT to track road vehicles. The Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation passenger buses moving between Delhi and Jaipur are fitted with RFID transponders, enabling their movement to be tracked.

A registered user can log on to the system through the Internet and can view the current status of the vehicle. Many companies in developed countries take advantage of this tracking technology in their fleet operations. An estimated daily 2.5-3 million trucks move cross the country, logging about 300 km a day against 800 km in developed countries. A 10 per cent increase in the productivity of trucks would yield an annual saving of some Rs 20,000 crore. Truck transporters use mobile phones that have GPS tracking. The phone is able to capture data in real time. This data is transmitted to the Internet, and then to the company's computers, for viewing at any time.

Vehicle tracking is helping businesses to improve their logistics. For mapping a driver's journey, the blackbox in the truck records, for example, the number of times he exceeds the speed prescribed on highways, the number of halts taken, and also the route charted by the truck.

We have thus seen, in the course of the article, the various areas of application for RFID. The success of this technology, however, depends largely on its integration with the existing business applications and enterprise solutions.

As we have seen, retail outlets, industries, warehouses, travel/car fleet units and airports are significant adopters of this technology for managing security, access control, logistics as well as real time information access and updates.

RFID is finding its place in access control systems of parking lots and toll roads. It also finds its use in banks, judiciary and government to track important document files.

Concluded

(The author is former MD, Concor.)