(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...Hung jury - RFID vs. bar code tags
By Joaquim P. Menezes -
On Friday, I attended a demo at Recall Canada’s Brampton facility – relating to the company’s recently rolled out RFID-based document-management system.
Speakers at the event gushed about the benefits of the new technology to customers.
Sean O’Brien, Recall’s General Manager of Canadian Operations spoke about how the rollout out would enhance the inventory audit process, without driving up customer costs significantly.
He contrasted that with the significant costs and problems associated with inventory audits conducted by conventional bar code scanning processes.
The barcode scanning process (that the Brampton facility has used until now) is labour intensive, time-consuming, costly and prone to error, he pointed out.
“To any audit we would have to go to the rack, locate which bay the carton is in, pull it down, find the bar code, scan the carton, place it back – and then go to the next location to complete the audit.”
Such a manual, bar code, scan of (say) 280 cartons, he said, would normally take around 27 minutes. “With RFID, we can scan those 280 cartons in 30 seconds. We could audit this whole facility – which has 2.5 million cartons – in just five days. That’s how quick this works.”
Recall’s experience notwithstanding, the jury is still out on the question of RFID’s effectiveness versus bar code scanning – and industry observers say many variables should be considered when opting for one or the other technology.
For instance, firms such as Midland, Mich.-based Dow Chemicals have done several pilot tests on RFID and other location-oriented technologies – including traditional bar codes.
Early projects have shown that sometimes — such as when it’s paired with a sensor log to transmit environmental readings during shipments, for instance – the use of RFID makes sense.
But at other times bar codes still prove cheaper and easier.
Both the RFID technology and marketplace are fragmented and slow-moving, analysts say, and costs remain high.
