Sidebar: Metro CIO Says Retailer Faces 'Very Normal' Challenges on RFID

Computerworld - NEW YORK -- German retailer Metro AG began rolling out radio frequency identification technology last November at selected warehouses and stores, working with 20 of its business partners. Metro CIO Zygmunt Mierdorf spoke with Computerworld about the company's RFID initiative at the National Retail Federation's annual convention and expo here last week. Excerpts from the interview follow:

What were your primary areas of focus during the past year? We did a lot of work around RFID to get a better understanding [of] the technology, to understand the technical challenges around it and also to finally work out the procedure, how to implement this technology in our organization.
[A year ago,] we still we were not absolutely clear whether we would combine pallet and case [tagging] from the very beginning. But then, through the discussions at the EPCglobal court and the understanding that the Generation 2 tag would come up with significantly more capabilities with higher reader accuracy [and] a wider range of frequencies, we decided that we would change our rollout procedure and we would use the first phase [in] 2004 and a big part of 2005 just to learn with the technology that's implemented.
If we look at the rollout and the implementation of these technologies with our suppliers and within our organization, we see that the technology itself delivers the result as expected -- the reading result, the reading quality, the reading efficiency. Everything works to our expectations. What we also see is that the technology requires changes in the business processes, and this is like the experience with EDI at the very beginning.
We said we would implement RFID with suppliers who are capable of running [an EDI document that is known in the U.S. as an Advanced Ship Notice]. We run into situations where the suppliers try it, it doesn't work the first time, so they have to try it again. It's very normal day-to-day problems we run into.

Why did you decide to make the ASN a requirement for your suppliers? We have decided to make it a prerequisite for the RFID implementation [because we'll] get all the information about the delivered product via EDI upfront. If we have the Advanced Ship Notice and the pallet comes in, we can match it automatically, and if it works, we just push the merchandise into either the distribution center or the store. So it significantly reduces the workload.
Some of the suppliers still struggle to implement Advanced Ship Notices into their systems. And others who have