Integrating the Supply Chain with RFID: A Technical and Business Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the technical and business implications of adopting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in organizational settings. The year 2004 marked a significant shift toward adopting RFID because of mandates by large retailers and government organizations. The use of RFID technology is expected to increase rapidly in the next few years. At present, however, initial barriers against widespread adoption include standards, interoperability, costs, forward compatibility, and lack of familiarity. This paper describes basic components of an RFID system including tags, readers, and antennas and how they work together using an integrated supply chain model. Our analysis suggests that business needs to overcome human resource scarcity, security, legal and financial challenges and make informed decision regarding standards and process reengineering. The technology is not fully mature and suffers from issues of attenuation and interference. A laboratory experiment conducted by the authors shows that the middleware is not yet at a "plug-and-play" stage, which means that initial adopters need to spend considerable effort to integrate RFID into their existing business processes. Appendices contain a glossary of common RFID terms, a list of RFID vendors and detailed findings of the laboratory experiment.

RFID: An Emerging Paradigm for the Agrifood Supply Chain

“…Tags can work at low frequencies, high frequencies, and ultra high frequencies and according to their power source tags may be passive (no power source), semi-passive (battery-assisted), or active (self-powered). Active tags use a battery to obtain their power and have a larger communication range, higher data-transmission rates, and broader data-storage capacity than passive tags (Asif and Mandviwalla, 2005;Castro and Fosso Wamba, 2007). Passive tags are more widely used for tagging goods since they are less expensive than active tags, with an estimated cost ranging from US$0.05 to US$0.25 per passive tag compared with more than US$20 and up per active tag (Attaran, 2007;Curtin et al, 2007).…”

A Novel RFID Data Mining System: Integration of Effective Sequential Pattern Mining and Fuzzy Rules Generation Techniques

“…The tag can be tied to an object and be read out with reader hardware either in the form of a hand-reader or a RFID gate [14]. The tags are radically different from printed barcodes in their capability to hold data, at which range the tags can be read, and the nonexistence of line-of-sight constraints [15].…”

Key performance indicators for the evaluation of RFID-enabled B-to-B e-commerce applications: the case of a five-layer supply chain

“…All these elements are essential to constitute a ''basic'' RFID system (Asif and Mandviwalla 2005). This RFID system is generally integrated with enterprises systems (e.g.…”

“…RFID has been the topic of interest in various fields of research (Ngai et al 2008;Chao et al 2007) related to the technology itself (Asif and Mandviwalla 2005), innovation management and potential trajectories for RFID adoption (Sheffi 2004) implementation in an inter-organizational context (Curtin et al 2007), CRM (customer relationship management) (Smith 2005), PLM (product lifecycle management) integrating reverse SC activities (Kiritsis et al 2003), and an increasing number of papers in SCM. In a recent historical review and bibliometric analysis, Chao et al (2007, pp.…”

“…specialized skills required for RFID implementation) (5) patent challenges (i.e. EPCglobal's intellectual property (IP) policy and concerns about royalty costs) (Asif and Mandviwalla 2005;Wu et al 2006;Li et al2006). …”