Sidebar: Too Close for Comfort: RFID's Reliability Problems

Computerworld - The first phase of an RFID implementation is an intensive education project focused on experimenting with small numbers of tags and readers in your own environment. This in itself is a costly process, adding up to much more than the tag costs themselves.
Gene E. Obrock, vice president of operations at Henkel Consumer Adhesives Inc., sees the technology improving in three-month increments. But today, it's still "like a big science project" to get the tags, antennas and readers to all work correctly together in your specific environment, says John Fontanella, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. Not only is reliability well below 99%, but you also need to consider antenna configuration, the placement of the tags on the boxes, how the boxes are assembled on pallets, dock-door characteristics, the proximity of tags to one another, interference from metal and liquids, and the presence of other radio frequency devices such as cell phones and wireless LANs, he says.
"If certain things are packed too tightly or tags are closely adjoined within a certain range, it can cause interference," adds Steve Banker, service director of supply chain management at ARC Advisory Group Inc. "You have to figure it out SKU by SKU."
Sometimes, these limitations can lead to simple process changes. That's a lesson that TrenStar learned. An Englewood, Colo.-based mobile asset management firm, TrenStar has used RFID to help beer distributors in the U.K. track their containers as they move through the supply chain. "We had a customer that wanted us to read tags on nine beer kegs on a pallet, stacked three deep," says David Adams, senior vice president of corporate strategy at TrenStar. That wasn't possible because of the metal kegs. The fix was to scan each layer individually, before more kegs were stacked. "This had to be adjusted into the ROI," Adams points out.
Brandel is a freelance writer in Grand Rapids, Mich. Contact her at mary.brandel@comcast.net.