CEO, Co-Founder

Mark,

We are totally in agreement with you about the long term potential for improved and more efficient supply chains, manufacturing operations and customer facing solutions. However our approach to communicating that potential value proposition to business executives is different than what you appear to be advocating.

We are one of the companies that downplays the emphasis on RFID. And we believe for good reason. By focusing on the business problem to be solved, we can engage the senior business executives whose lives would be made better if we can deliver on a solution to their problem, weather it be increased inventory accuracy to get at the excess inventory problem you mentioned in your post or for any of a myriad of other things that real-time visibility into a products where abouts and its movement can provide improvement. But leading with and placing emphasis on RFID as a technology immediately relegates the discussion to the IT group. They are not the decision makers. They do now own the problem. They assist the business executives when evaluating which potential solution fits best into their current technology infrastructure. But they typically are not the thought leaders that will introduce the changes necessary within an organization to embrace a full scale process re-engineering needed to get the most out of an RFID enabled solution.

Now before all of the IT leaders out there take umbrage with this remark, there have and continue to be very forward thinking IT leaders sprinkled within organizations big and small. We see their names and hear their presentations at conferences because they represent the minority of companys, early adopters if you will, of RFID enabled solutions. However, they are not the eyes and ears of the mass market that we all need to sell into to see RFID enabled solutions go mainstream.

Persisting to place emphasis on RFID only serves, at least in our experience, to create an artificial barrier between the message that we are trying to communicate and the business executives who are in need of hearing the message. So while being truly appreciative of everything that the RFID Journal and especially you Mark, are trying to do to advocate for the advancement of the technology, we believe it is time to lead our discussions with non technology charged language. And oh, by the way, we couldn't deliver the value to you mr and mrs customer without RFID.