17 NOVEMBER, 2004

Studying cases

For many companies, RFID represents that scariest of issues – a technology they are pretty sure they will need to exploit, sooner rather than later, and a subject with an unavoidably steep learning curve. So any source of knowledge on the subject has to be worth some investigation. Here is just one example: the IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase, which now exceeds 1000 case studies of RFID in action, covering activities of over 1250 companies.

According to the company, RFID is now so ubiquitous that few participants know of all the activities in their chosen application, let alone the reasons behind their success or failure. With a database that is growing towards 2000 case studies, it could well become a useful resource for answering a wide range of questions from "What is going on in my country?" and "What are the most popular frequencies for this application?" to "What has that supplier done before and was it successful?"

The company also claims that the knowledgebase is capable of identifying new trends. For example, failures today are less likely to be due to lack of standards or equipment not working. Instead, it is more common to see the funding company say a trial was successful, establishing a good payback, but that funds are not available for a full rollout.

Another common reason that has emerged is failure to link to legacy systems, often because the difficulty is underestimated. It also seems that active RFID tags are far more popular than is commonly realised – there are already over 150 case studies on these. Item level tagging is also getting popular, with over 50 case studies recorded.

www.rfidbase.com