INTERSYSTEMS

Thinking beyond ‘slap and ship’ – optimizing RFID by overhauling the back-end

Few technologies have created such large scale excitement, and at such a cross-sector and global level, as RFID. The technology, and the connected, efficient and integrated supply chain that it will create, is set to eradicate the current inefficiencies that characterise many of the world’s supply chains today. In fact, some analysts estimate that 2-3% of all products are currently lost in the production and shipping process. This means that the overall market opportunity for RFID is huge. It has been predicted that the global spend on the technology this year alone could be the realms of some 390 million dollars.

But this does not mean that the market will not face its challenges and RFID technology will not be implemented overnight. The issues of standards, cost, privacy and security remain to be resolved. For example, governments and organisations will need to communicate effectively on RFID standards development, interoperability between markets and the future potential for the technology as it develops. In particular, the EU wants to develop its own RFID standard to reflect its own concerns and interests, but this standard will also need to be interoperable with RFID solutions in use elsewhere in the world. This in itself represents a real technological challenge.

One of the greatest stumbling blocks, however, to wide-scale RFID implemetation is a real and effective business case for the technology and many businesses are adopting a wait and see attitude. A big reason for this is that the underlying issues around RFID are not only standards, cost, privacy and security. The level of data exposure and data flow that the technology will entail means that a lot of legacy databases and back-end systems will need to be overhauled in line with supply chain management infrastructures to enable the technology to deliver return on investment.

RFID as a technology is not new, and in fact has been in use since the 1940s. However advancements mean that it can now be applied much more widely in commercial environments with very real business benefits. In the last twelve months to two years, numerous organisations have embarked upon trials with positive results, meaning that companies are now starting to apply the technology where they see a business advantage in doing so.

The knock-on effect of this is that new applications will have to be built to serve these business functions, and existing applications will need to be re-architected. There will be a number of challenges that will have to be overcome to do this.

First, while companies around the globe will begin implementing the technology and researching where they will reap benefits from it, the market is such that no one company will be able to provide complete end-to-end solutions for RFID. This means that developers will be key to any organisation that is considering introducing RFID applications into their business. Recent news stories, however, have highlighted the fact that there may be a lack of skilled RFID staff in the near term. In addition, these developers will need to have the requisite skills to enable them to work closely with other technical and operations staff.

Another challenge will be that RFID projects will need to focus on the real cost of business benefits – the greatest benefits may require changes to business processes. This means that the development processes and applications will need to be flexible enough to cope with the changes that will take place throughout the life-cycle of any given RFID implementation.

Unlike typical business applications, RFID applications receive physical measurements – tag reads – in (near) real-time; these are known as events. This is where the large volumes of data will be created. Business events will also be generated, which will need to be communicated to existing systems, ideally in real-time, representing another issue to overcome from an IT perspective.

Finally, RFID applications will capture vast amounts of event data that has not been available to the business previously, and so companies will now need to determine what information they need, to what detail and when. For example, an RFID tag typically identifies an individual product item or transit container, and therefore RFID systems will generate much larger amounts of data than have been seen in the supply chain to date. This can therefore potentially result in huge pressure being put upon RFID applications in terms of the amount of data they need to capture, filter and store.

The InterSystems solution
InterSystems has two main product offerings that can help overcome some of the above challenges, namely Caché and Ensemble. Its technology solutions, which are easy to implement and use, can help form the lynchpin around applications using RFID. Indeed the company’s experience in capturing, managing and representing data means it is well positioned to capitalise on this market and aid companies in successful roll-out (please see box-out for further information).

Caché offers a rapid application development and high-performance database platform that is capable of handling the vast amounts of data which RFID applications will generate. Additionally, Ensemble offers a services oriented and event driven integration platform solution which is key to integrating RFID information with the rest of the enterprise (please see box-out for further information).

For organisations to take full advantage of RFID technology, whatever the sector they work in and whatever specific applications they are using it for, they will have to move beyond ‘slap and ship’ applications and consider how to best use the data generated. In essence, as RFID will generate significant amounts of information, they will have to give serious thought to how back end systems will cope and adapt their systems at every level to this new scale of information flow.

Duncan Allen, InterSystems