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RFID Adoption Tilting Towards Process Improvements, Report Finds

Posted on Wednesday, December 27, 2006 3:00:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                            Digg This Article   Add to Delicious

Abstract:Even as retail compliance mandate activities push down market, smaller manufacturers are twice as likely to deploy RFID to improve operational efficiencies as their larger company counterparts, a study from ChainLink Research reveals.
Keywords:RFID, mandate, business process improvement, tags, readers, ChainLink Research, EPC Gen 2
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2006 might not have been "the year" of RFID as some pundits had predicted, but it was a time in which manufacturers large and small began deploying the auto-ID technology to support business-critical process enhancements that transcend partner mandates, according to a recently published study from ChainLink Research Inc.

The report, entitled "RFID for Manufacturers: How Manufacturers are Improving Processes by Using RFID", surveyed 275 manufacturers to examine the ROI differences between mandate-driven vs. process-improvement-driven RFID implementations. The report looks at a wide array of RFID-enabled process improvements manufacturers are making in the areas of inbound logistics, receiving, plant floor, shipping, distribution, service and support, asset management, and chain of custody management.

Of the 275 manufacturers surveyed, two-thirds said they are either implementing or plan soon to implement RFID. (Survey respondents carried operations titles spanning manager, director, and vice president across manufacturing, supply chain, quality, logistics, service, materials managers, and plant management functions.) Companies moving forward plan to spend twice as much money on RFID in 2007 than they did in 2005, according to Bill McBeath, ChainLink's chief research officer. Last year respondents said their companies spent $600,000 on average on RFID hardware, software, and services. That figure increased to $850,000 in 2006 and is projected to reach $1.3 million in 2007, he told Managing Automation.

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