You'd be forgiven for missing the most important development in RFID, or for dozing off if you did spot it. But earlier this month, GS1 announced the Tagged Item Performance Protocol (TIPP), a new approach to testing tags that simplifies life for retailers, suppliers and tag vendors, and ensures that tags will really work in the field.
Standards group GS1 US has released its Tagged-Item Performance Protocol (TIPP), a guideline that includes a scale for grading the performance of EPC ultrahigh-frequency RFID tags when used on specific products and in specific environments, as well standardizing the testing conducted to identify that grade.
For some supply chain and logistics functions, rugged wearable computers can be a real boon. At the same time, the cost of managing these devices can be daunting.
Item-level intelligence requirements spur the growth of RFID across sectors such as industrial, manufacturing, retail, transportation, security, healthcare and consumer applications. RFID has quietly crossed the chasm exhibiting a stable - yet still innovative - market. So what will drive the market in 2015?
The University of Southern California housing office knew its housing facilities, on and off campus, had upwards of 60,000 pieces of furniture and appliances. But until the student housing office deployed a radio frequency identification system, tracking which items were at what locations, as well as which were broken, missing or due for replacement, required exhaustive manual inventories. Those inventory counts, typically conducted during summers, required the hiring of temporary workers and many hours of labor to catalog what was where.
In less than a decade, the mobile internet revolution has overtaken the digital revolution and is still accelerating. Mobile penetration is increasing, the costs of access and devices are coming down, and more and more people in both developed and developing economies are using the mobile internet as their first - and often their only - means of going online. Let's look at the phenomenon in Europe.
There's an app for that. That's long been the joke amongst smartphone toting consumers. More and more, the same can be said for supply chain management and logistics tasks.
RFID retail inventory management can deliver benefits for most apparel retailers now. The basic handheld solution is not hard to understand, delivers real ROI and has a relatively low investment hurdle. Yes, employee training and compliance is a headache, but this is true for many jobs in retail, and it does not change the fact that significant sales uplift is not only possible, but typical.
