Over the past decade, several industries have considered RFID technology for improving supply chain efficiency. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) initiated and sponsored a number of RFID trials between 2003 and 2006. METI selected the Japanese publishing industry, one of the largest publishing industries in the world, for an early item-level RFID trial geared to increasing industry profitability. This paper uses case study methodology to examine the 2006 METI RFID trial in the Japanese publishing industry. It reports on the trial results and on their implications. The study derives some insights concerning trial composition and the feasibility and efficiency of item-level RFID from the sub-trials. Setting the 2006 METI RFID trial into a broader perspective, the paper concludes with a summary, some lessons learned, and an outlook on future research.
320Volume 23Article 18
I. INTRODUCTIONOver the past decade, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has appeared on the radar screens of several industries. Major publishing associations [Falk 2004;Hicks 1999] have increasingly considered RFID for supply chain efficiency improvements on a global scale. In many countries, publishers and retailers have begun to investigate how RFID technology works and have subsequently put it on their strategic agenda [Lichtenberg 2003].As in several European countries and the U.S., Japan has actively fostered RFID, both in terms of Research and Development (R&D) and practical application since the late 1990s [Shirai and Johnson 2006]. The Japanese RFID market for tags, other system components, and software is expected to grow from €64 million in 2000 to about €850 million in 2008 and €2.75 billion in 2013 [MIC 2006].The Japanese publishing industry, one of the largest in the world with about 4,500 publishers, 70 wholesalers, and more than 20,000 retail outlets including bookstores, second-hand bookstores, and libraries ], has taken a national and even global precursor role in testing RFID technology across the publishing supply chain. These tests included RFID infrastructure and applications reaching from production to individual products in the store. This paper analyzes the RFID-related efforts undertaken by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in the Japanese publishing industry. It explores which implications the required business processes, cost, and turnover have for industry-wide RFID adoption and roll-out. METI conducted an initial RFID trial between 2003 and 2005. In 2006, it then funded a large-scale RFID project which focused on item-level applications and involved various players in the publishing context. (For applications on logistic units, mainly in other industries, see for instance Angeles [2005], Bose [2005], Karkkainen and Holmstroem [2002], Loebbecke [2006], or Loebbecke and Palmer [2006]). We structure our research in four steps. (1) We motivate our study and establish an explorative research question based on a review of the RFID-related literature and disc...
