German Study Shows Companies Dissatisfied With RFID's Ability to Meet Goals

The report's authors say the technology is still far from reaching its potential, and note that 25 percent of respondents believe that for a variety of reasons—each different, depending on the application—RFID was too immature to meet their company's goals.

Other results: Some 43 percent of RFID projects are initiated in IT departments. Sixty-six percent of the companies surveyed employ RFID for internal applications, while 40 percent use the technology with partners within the same branch. Only 23 percent reported a positive experience with RFID, while 18 percent had no experience. One third of respondents said they were partly happy with the ability of RFID to reach business goals, while another 32 percent were mostly happy and 18 percent were not happy at all.

Separately, the technical comparison showed that RFID component performance to be dependent on a variety of parameters. RFID applications suffer from a lack of standards, as well as the difficulty of setting up and tuning a system.

Many respondents said their companies experimented with RFID because they felt they must, given the hype surrounding the technology. "There's definitely a technology push, and not an industry pull," Glaser says. An absence of prime contractors that can provide complete RFID systems—including all the necessary hardware, software and consulting—made projects more complicated since companies had to work with an average of four partners on single projects.

Additionally, Glaser says, the study showed that most companies were unable to use RFID as part of a business case for a fundamental change in business process: "It is too overwhelming to refigure material flow, data flow and the flow of money in a single RFID project," he explains.

Finally, Glaser says the study revealed that most companies do not plan their applications properly to get the most out of RFID from a process-improvement and business perspective, though they are motivated by lowering costs (72 percent of respondents said they launched RFID projects to improve processes) and reducing errors.