Be Cautious on Investments in RFID, UPS Exec Advises

Computerworld - United Parcel Service Inc. is not only piloting radio frequency identification technology for internal use, but it also plans to provide consulting and services to help its customers comply with RFID mandates issued by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., other retailers and the U.S. Department of Defense. In an interview last week, David Barnes, a vice president of information services at UPS, spoke about some of the lessons the Atlanta-based company has learned about RFID. Excerpts follow:

What sort of RFID services is UPS offering to its customers? Customers are coming to us on many fronts, back to that simple "slap and stick": "Can you help us meet that deadline?" and "We just need to get this done." And there are customers in active discussions with us about "Can you just take it over and do it for us?" versus "Can you come in and consult and help us do it better?"

What do you tell them about what works and what doesn't work? If you go into some of the early-edition readers, a lot of these did not have the ability to be updated by software. One of the early lessons learned coming out of this is to be cautious of what you're investing in. Make sure it's adaptable to rapidly changing standards. If you're buying readers and hardware and such, make sure things can be backward-compatible and upgradable.

How many of your customers are dealing with the middleware aspects of RFID at this early stage? From what we have heard in discussions, a lot of customers have chosen middleware and bought that. I think what they're seeing is that it's rapidly changing. So there's an issue of "don't get too close to it because it's going to change rapidly over time." But middleware is a necessity in this. It's one thing to buy the tag. It's another to encode the tag. It's another to read the tag. But once you've read that tag, you have to have middleware to bring that back to some application, because even with the DOD or with Wal-Mart, you have to provide the information backwards.

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