RFID Interrogators Grow Up

Marcelo Pandini
Manager of RFID and business development
Hewlett-Packard Brazil

HP Brazil is tagging and tracking individual printers to improve supply-chain visibility, as well as its manufacturing and distribution processes.

"On our wish list are tags that cost less than 5 cents; readers with Wi-Fi and GPRS [General Packet Radio Service] connections; RFID devices working in a plug-and-play mode; and improved interoperability among devices, tags and middleware."


Patrick Richgels
IT specialist
Monsanto

The multinational provider of bioengineered agricultural products is testing the use of passive RFID to identify individual seed packets.

"Lower prices would be on my wish list. It's always a challenge to come up with return on investment. The other things would be improved reliability and performance, especially with regard to density. We would be interested in the ability to detect the position of items within a container."


Mark Pavuk
Service assets manager
Holt Cat

The heavy-equipment and service provider deployed RFID to track tools at its Irving, Texas, location.

"I'd like to see lower prices for RFID systems, and smaller, metal-friendly tags for tracking individual items in our tool rooms. To get the size [of the tags] down would be unbelievably helpful."


In K. Mun
VP, research and development, North Florida division
Hospital Corporation of America

The organization is using RFID for asset and patient tracking.

"The first real issue is the cost of ownership. RFID is simply too expensive. The infrastructure costs are so high. Secondly, reliability of passive RFID needs to improve. On the active side, some development needs to be done on batteries. The tags are simply too big for some applications."


Dave MacDonald
Director of information technology and registrar of voters
Alameda County, Calif.

The seventh-largest county in California is using EPC Gen 2 UHF tags to track election ballots. The RFID system promises to help ensure the ballots are collected and managed properly.

"Our biggest issue is the size of the passive tags. We'd like to see a smaller format. Another issue is pricing. I'd love to roll out RFID in other areas, but active tags are too expensive. I'd also like to find a bare-bones handheld reader that could wirelessly transmit data."