1. Clifford Poulard Team C http://facebook.com – Cliff Po
Insight on Technology: RFID Autoidentification: Making Your Supply Chain Visible
Clifford Poulard
Team C
– Cliff Po

2. Radio-frequency identification Overview:
RFID- is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves.
RFID systems include tags, readers and software to process the data.

3. Supply Chain RFID:
RFID will be a major advance in supply chain management, but enterprises will need to do considerable upfront planning and testing to successfully implement and integrate the technology.
RFID will have a significant impact on every feature of supply chain management , such as moving goods through loading docks, to the complex, such as managing terabytes of data as information about goods on hand is collected in real time.
RFID will initially be used to manage the identification of large lots of goods for example, at the pallet and carton levels. RFID tags, therefore, must have unique serial identifier information that associates each lot with a corresponding bill of lading sent from the originator.

4. How Does It Work
The development of standards for encoding information on RFID tags will be critical to making the technology as important to the supply chain as bar codes currently are.
The standard body that manages UPC (universal product code) information in bar codes, sets the standards for how basic product information is encoded in the RFID chips.

5. Why Use It ? RFID chips are designed to replace bar codes.
When one company ships goods to another company, these standards will help simplify the electronic transactions that occur between the organizations ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems.
The current version of the EPC (electronic product code) Tag Data Standard specifies the data format for encoding and reading data from 64- and 96-bit RFID tags.
The data stored in these tags dictates information about a product in UPC terms, including company and product identifiers.

6. Conclusion
In conclusion, the enterprise applications that touch the supply chain, such as ERP, warehouse management systems and CRM (customer relationship management) applications, do not integrate directly with RFID systems.
Companies considering RFID technology need to determine how best to manage the flow of data from the reader to an application and to the user through RFID technology.
Figuring out even the basics of RFID technology implementation, such as where to place RFID tags, will require testing and resources that may be out of reach for many small businesses.

7. Question?