From the NY Times:
Some consumer products companies will have to invest millions of dollars to comply with Wal-Mart's drive to have every carton and palette it receives carry a radio identification tag, according to a report to be released today by A. T. Kearney, a consulting firm.
"It's a big item that most of them have not budgeted for," said David Dannon, vice president for the consumer industries and retail products practice at Kearney, a Chicago-based subsidiary of Electronic Data Services.
[...]
"Some of our clients are saying we are going to drag this out as long as we can," Mr. Carey said. Still, getting on the wrong side of Wal-Mart is not widely viewed as an option.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/technology/10radio.html
Posted by holtzman at November 10, 2003 06:12 PM> To get enough data to cut costs substantially, manufacturers need tags that can be rewritten as they move through the supply chain, [Deloitte's] Mr. Carey said.
Well, no, not really; unless he's referring to tags w/associated sensors (so that a case of fruit could monitor what temperature it's stored at), one simply uses the uniqueness of a given tag to pass information on it back to somewhere else. Of course, this does then presume the information infrastructure to carry all of the read information around... any readers put in will need to be coupled into the organizations' networks.
There's the whole separate issue of whether or not those who desire information on the products they tag will be provided it by those parties who detect the tags, e.g., if Minute Maid wants to know how fast its orange juice moves through the supply chain, it's got to rely on the various parties in the chain to report data back. That future information economy might prove very interesting.
Posted by: Ross Stapleton-Gray at November 11, 2003 03:28 PMWe've got a new white paper out, expressing some skepticism at benefits to retailers; it focuses more specifically on the "unfriendly" ground of the retail shelves, i.e., on the utility of RFID in managing/monitoring product where it's interacting with customers, and not in the more controllable back room. The paper is here: http://www.stapleton-gray.com/papers/sk-20031113.PDF
I suspect that the real winners in the deployment of RFID, in addition to those who'll sell tags, readers, and implementing software and systems, will be those parties who make their living collecting and selling RFID-derived data, e.g., aggregating retailer-observed data for sale back to the manufacturers, as folks like IRI do today with register tape data.