- Companies are relying on outside advice, rather than educating their own RFID team members, and this is leading to bad outcomes.
At the RFID Journal LIVE! conference and exhibition held in Las Vegas in May, I attended an industry gathering hosted by RFID Journal and GS1. Attendees from companies in the aerospace, health care, logistics, manufacturing, retail and other sectors discussed issues they had experienced when deploying RFID solutions. One gentleman from a large aerospace company mentioned that his firm had encountered problems scaling their RFID solution that they had not foreseen. After the luncheon ended, I went over to learn what scaling issues he was referring to.
This person— I do not want to reveal his name or company since we were speaking off the record— said that his software provider was charging per reader and antenna and as the solution scaled up, it was becoming unaffordable. Another issue was the volume of data crashing their servers. He said: “I wish we had been informed about this before we started, but we basically just did what our solution provider suggested.”
Later on, I meant another gentleman at the event who told me that he followed the advice of a large tag manufacturer and “no we’re locked into using their tags.” He found cheaper tags at the event that would work just as well, but his company had no option for using them because it had signed a restrictive contract.
I have been having conversations like these for more than 25 years. I have learned a lot from interviewing companies about their RFID projects on the record and from having off-the-record conversations as well. I am now working to put the knowledge in my head into education materials for the RFID Professional Institute. I am working on PDF study guide’s for exams, and I plan to follow this up with video materials that will make it easy for anyone to learn everything in a few hours that I have learned in my 25 years covering RFID technology.
I do not have high hopes that companies will purchase these educational materials. In my experience, most companies take the easy way out and hire consultants or solution providers who tell them what to do. They don’t bother to educate their RFID team members, and so they get a suboptimal RFID solution. This is not because the consultants or solution providers are incompetent or corrupt. It’s mainly because they don’t know anything about the company’s operations and because they are putting their own interests ahead of the customers.
Some friends in the industry ask me why I persist in doing these educational materials if there is no financial incentive. It’s a good question. I spent 25 years trying to grow the RFID industry. It pains me when I hear about companies that make mistakes and have bad experiences. I have the resources now to invest in these educational materials, I have the time, and my hope is that a few companies will be willing to not take the easy way out, to educate their team and to get RFID right. They can then be examples for others to follow.
