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NOVEMBER, 2004 Not all Wal-Mart suppliers will achieve the 1st January 2005 RFID deadline Erik Michielsen ABI Research Director of RFID reported 17th November that the 1st January 2005 deadline for the Wal-Mart top 100 suppliers to implement RFID will only be achieved by around 30%. Michielsen says that the remaining 70% are just trying the systems with simple tagging and will implement the more fully over the course of 2005. He goes on to report that Wal-Mart have stated that they did not expect every one to achieve the deadline but they wanted to create an incentive for the introduction of RFID systems and to get their suppliers to modify their procedures to cope with the technology. In the introduction to RFIDtoday I said that I thought that for anyone to try to throw a system in 90 days was doomed to disaster and it would result in the inevitable financial loss. According to Michielsen, suppliers to Wal-Mart have said that they cannot afford the cost of the trials but he feels that the truth may be that "there haven’t been reputable integrators in the Market" He goes on to conclude that "only now are we seeing Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft getting involved at the product personnel level" What drove ADA Communications towards RFID was the clear case that the larger companies had work to do on handling the vast amounts of data that will be collected in middleware. Also the focus appeared to be firmly on the excitement of Point of Sale issues when the real benefits will accrue further back in the supply chain. And this will not only apply to the retail sector. And what will a company do with all of this data it has collected? Will it all just sit there on their systems and backed up onto the spare drives and tapes for posterity? Don’t laugh – this happens to perhaps three-quarter of all data collected by companies today. With RFID they will be able to collect even more! See www.abiresearch.com |
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