February 19, 2004

Keeping Track of Your Clothes (and maybe you)

RFIDs well probably be a positive thing for retail inventory management:

(London, UK - 18 February 2004) Exel, the global leader in supply chain management, has announced that it will embark on a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) project with House of Fraser, Britain's leading department store group. The trial will represent one of the most advanced and ambitious projects in the industry as it will test the application of RFID across international supply chains.

The project will encompass individual products from House of Fraser's own brand manufacturers in China. RFID tags will be attached directly to garments providing the scope to track shipment movements at item level. The tags enable automatic, real-time product visibility at any point in the supply chain.

This type of application is well underway in the US as well. In particular Wal-Mart has an agressive program.

Once these things proliferate everyone and their cousin will have RFID readers, for example: 1) your friendly border guard will quickly know that you are lying about the price of that nice coat from Canada; 2) on the positive (?) side the traffic cop could quickly know if there are stolen goods in the car she just stopped; 3) your neighbor will know that you bought that sweater at the dollar store not Nordstroms. We will all probably need to buy RFID zappers to kill the damn things once we take something out of the store.

Oh, and remember to pay cash so that your purchases can't be tied back to your credit card. There is no point in feeding federal, state, local or business databases and giving the banks an automatic skim on everything that you buy.

Via White Rose.

Posted by Steve on February 19, 2004
Comments

For the past 12 years, Gordon Cook has written about every aspect of the commercial Internet. Detailed interviews with the leaders of the field have given him a body of knowledge of unique breadth and depth. Gordon has used that broad knowledge to develop a complete analysis of the commercial, political, economic, system and technical issues surrounding the broad introduction of RFID technology into the Global Economy.

His research has resulted in an exhaustive examination of the technology, architecture, and business strategy of RFID, in inventory management and, much more importantly, in the supply chain. He examines the Auto-ID, EPCglobal VeriSign Alliance to create "wireless" bar codes. He explains why this will have little impact unless and until it is well integrated into a wide range of corporate ERP systems. He describes why some companies that use web services, RosettaNet and appropriate supply chain software don't have any ROI yet for using RFID. Finally he looks in great detail at a very innovative and comprehensive service grid approach where goods may be tracked with mobile agent software from manufacture to point of sale.

An extract from the report and the full contents list can be found on my web site - RFID Exchange.


Thanks

Steve Heap
RFID Exchange
www.rfidexchange.com

Posted by Steve Heap at March 25, 2004 6:06 PM
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