This article was originally published by RFID Update.
July 12, 2005—If justifying an RFID expenditure persists as a damper to wider adoption stateside, it is only more so across the pond in Europe. This according to a recent survey by BEA Systems of 150 information technology and logistics executives from the UK and Finland. A whopping 70 percent of respondents claim the need for “a lot more information” before making a decision one way or the other about deploying the technology. Sixty percent see data management and integration as the biggest issues confronting the deployment of RFID. Heljä Salomaa of the Finnish Post, which has an RFID pilot underway, was quoted as saying, “To realise the full benefits of RFID companies need to ensure that their business infrastructure can scale to handle the data volumes the technology will generate.” Perhaps most extreme of all, a mere five of the companies surveyed are actually already using RFID. Predictably, the underlying issue is cost. A third cited RFID’s price tag (and flipside, indemonstrable ROI) as the leading hurdle to implementation.
One curious statistic was that less than one-third of the respondents “clearly see the benefits of RFID” and a full 10 percent simply had “no idea.” If interpreted at face value, these numbers stand in stark contrast to what would be found in North America. They suggest that the myriad efficiencies to be gained from track-and-trace, widely touted in the US, are either not compelling or not understood in Europe.
Read the full recap at silicon.com
