By John Edwards

Feb. 1, 2010—The dawn of the 21st century's second decade marks an evolution in radio frequency identification technologies and practices. RFID adopters in diverse fields, including health care, manufacturing, retail and transportation, are moving beyond basic pallet, case and item tracking. Many are tapping into RFID's ability to provide meaningful, actionable insight into asset and inventory management, customer service, distribution, employee productivity, sales and a myriad of other critical business activities. RFID's new age can be described with a single word: visibility.

"Visibility today has taken on a much more focused meaning when it comes to RFID," says Russ Klein, emerging technology research director at Aberdeen Group. It gives RFID adopters the ability to obtain meaningful answers to complex business questions. "It's much more than 'Where is my stuff, where has it been, who has touched it and has it been handled properly?'" he says. "It's now: 'Can I improve the efficiency of my processes, can I predict the bottlenecks or, better yet, can I predict demand based on the data I'm collecting?'" An RFID deployment engineered for visibility, he says, allows such questions to be answered "at every level of the organization, from the line of business up to the CEO."

Illustration: Michael Knight/iStockphoto

Awareness of RFID's visibility potential is now widespread, says William McNeill, an analyst at AMR Research. "Visibility typically ranks as the top initiative, or business problem, any time we do any kind of formalized survey," he notes. "Even when we do more informal research...visibility always ranks at the top."