German casual apparel company Marc O'Polo has adopted a radio frequency identification solution to track its products across the entire supply chain, from its distribution center to 86 of its stores throughout Europe. The company finished installing the system at all 87 sites by September 2014, and is now expanding the deployment to include the tagging of products by manufacturers, thereby enabling the retailer to track its merchandise from the point at which they are made.
Globally, mobile technology has emerged as a primary engine of economic growth, stimulating enormous private-sector spending in both R&D and infrastructure, and profoundly changing daily lives - everywhere.
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.
