Towards ’smarter’ Supply and Demand-Chain Collaboration Practices Enabled by RFID Technology

Conclusions The previous discussion assumes that all the technical barriers regarding the application of RFID have been overcome, and that RF-tags have been introduced on all or a big proportion of consumer goods. However, this assumption is still far from reality, as technical barriers have not been totally overcome yet, especially when considering large-scale implementations, and standards are still evolving to support the wide adoption of RFID technology across the industry. While research is progressing fast on the standards and technology front, there is an ever increasing concern about consumer privacy relating to the use of RF-tags on consumer goods, which has recently led companies like Benetton and Wal-Mart to temporarily shirk RFID-at-consumer-level pilots (McGinity, 2004). Analysts predict that while four or five years will pass before consumers are directly affected by RFID, privacy will be a major problem, if it isn’t addressed up-front. These concerns, in combination with the lower costs associated with introducing RF-tags on product cases and pallets instead of consumer units, currently lead the industry to implementing warehouse applications in the first round. Eventually, privacy concerns will be overcome, as has happened during the initial introduction of barcode technology several decades ago, allowing companies to adopt advanced RFID applications and smarter collaboration practices. This perspective opens up many new directions for research and development in this area, relating both to technology and the many different business aspects associated with it. The work presented in this paper is a first attempt towards this direction.