More CEOs should be aware that RFID can help drive incremental revenue in a wide number of industries. Today, most executives likely consider RFID to be an operational efficiency tool. Nonetheless, we now see examples where RFID enables revenue enhancement by improving customer facing tasks, offering a differentiated service, providing business intelligence or through offering [...]
We understand that UPM Raflatac will implement a 10% price increase for all UHF inlays effective March 1; Avery Dennison will follow on April 1 with a 10% increase of their own. Some HF products will also be subject to the price increase. In our view this is simply a reaction to basic market forces [...]
We attended the National Retail Federation show in New York and wanted to provide a few thoughts on the progression of RFID. In general, the show was much more well-attended than last year, and we were particularly interested to see a number of retail senior executives looking at a wide variety of new technologies – [...]
Guest Column – By Bert Moore, AIM, Inc.
Historically, articles looking at RFID in the coming year have focused on supply chain or asset tracking or access control or smart phones or any of a dozen other key applications where RFID could offer significant advantages. It’s true that market growth is important. But the roll-out of [...]
We wanted to provide a few thoughts on what might be noteworthy events in the RFID industry during 2010. Our discussion is framed with a brief historical perspective as well as our key expectations for 2010 that include a short-term market focus, key projects, new product capabilities and privacy. We hope our thoughts will provide [...]
We have learned that the Freestyle equipment has seen deployment of about 100 test units. Based on the tests, some modest modifications are being made. We expect pilot production, which will ensure a level of manufacturing repeatability, will be conducted in a 3-4 month pilot program beginning early next year. The pilot program will likely [...]
Last month, we highlighted item level source tagging as a key opportunity for RFID to add value in several ways, including the reduction of annual shrink. Our initial analysis from the 2008 Global Retail Theft Barometer report, which we profiled in the January 2009 edition of RFID Monthly, suggested a very large problem, which companies [...]
GS1 announced the Foodservice GS1 US Standards initiative, which is designed to bring data synchronization to the food service supply chain. We view this initiative as similar to the Produce Traceability Initiative, and while not specifically intended for RFID, will act as an enabler for more effectively using either RFID or 2D bar codes. In [...]
Container Centralen continues to embrace RFID as an asset management tool. Recall, we highlighted in the August 2009 edition of RFID Monthly, the company’s plan to use Gen 2 tags to authenticate its pool of 3.5M containers in Europe. This implementation date was recently pushed back to November 1, 2010 from February 1, 2010 to [...]
Financial services firm CIT Group filed for bankruptcy in early November in order to restructure its debt. Recall, CIT is a commercial lender, which had provided $5B of funding to the U.S. retail industry in the form of direct lending to retailers as well as funding needs to retail vendors. The main concern, as we [...]