Feb. 1, 2005—In 1992, the year before Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor of New York, there were 203,311 violent crimes in the city, including 2,397 murders and 108,154 robberies. By 2000, violent crime was down 39 percent. Murders fell by 60 percent, robberies dropped by 63 percent, and the FBI declared New York the safest large city in the United States.

How did Giuliani achieve this turnaround when, for decades, crime in New York had seemed intractable? He didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put armies of police on the streets. He started by focusing on much smaller problems—vagrancy, car theft, small-time drug dealing and so on. By tackling many of the small things that contributed to lawlessness, he was able to have a major impact on violent crime.


What does this have to do with RFID? Not much—except it’s a brilliant illustration of the bottom-up approach companies need to take toward RFID. Instead of spending millions to attack out-of-stocks, excess inventory, manufacturing inefficiencies or other macro-level problems head-on, companies need to use RFID to root out the conditions that allow inefficiencies to persist in their internal supply chains.

The concept is deceptively simple: Solve lots of small problems—such as administrative errors, internal theft and put-away errors—and they add up to a big benefit. But the key to its success is to work within what we call a “benefits stack” and focus on the issues that contribute to one macro-level problem. That way, the small savings realized with each RFID application can multiply.