RFIDs and the Changing Marketplace

How Rfids Are Changing The Way We Track Items

RFID grew largely in the early 2000s when Wal-Mart as the world’s largest retailer and the Department of Defense as the world’s largest supply chain operator began mandating their suppliers to use RFIDs for their product shipments. This mandate caused the economy of scale for RFIDs to decrease prices, and also led to an industry technology standard to use EPCglobal’s Electronic Product Code (EPC) standard (Guido, Mainetti, & Patrono, 2012; Wamba, Lefebvre, Bendavid, & Lefebvre, 2008). Previously, the technology was stifled by a lack of uniformity between different RFID manufacturers’ software platform causing customers to acquire different receivers to detect and use different RFIDs. These advances are expected to continue the growth of the use of RFIDs across industries. Das and Harrop (2014) at IDTechEx find that the total RFID market in 2014 is worth $8.89 billion, up from $7.77 billion in 2013 and $6.96 billion in 2012. This includes tags, readers and software/services for RFID cards, labels, fobs and all other form factors. IDTechEx forecast that to rise to $27.31 billion in 2024. Thus, we can see the adoption of RFIDs in businesses is increased significantly in the past three years. It is expected to continue to grow significantly, so that someday it will be more prevalent than bar codes (Hunt, Puglia, & Puglia, 2007).

Businesses are demanding that their suppliers use RFIDs to track incoming shipments as it allows the organizations to make real-time decisions for inventory management and control. When businesses can project what time their supplies will arrive, they can coordinate to make business decisions based on projected inventory. The implementation of RFIDs helps things such as manufacturing scheduling, floor layouts, and even sales. For instances, whenever there is a projected big shipment arriving, that room must be made available in the warehouse (Sharifi, et al., 2013; Wamba & Chatfield, 2011).