Time for that Saturday morning shopping trip to Wal-Mart. You grab your smart cart, stroll the aisles, and scan your merchandise into an electronic reader. You're done in a half-hour. You press OK on the smart cart to bill your credit card, bag up your goods, and off you go.
What's different than your typical outing to the store? You didn't waste 15 minutes in line reading about Elvis's alien reincarnation in the National Enquirer. And the Wal-Mart staff you usually see at the checkout have been reallocated because the store no longer needs dozens of checkout personnel. Put another way, you've just experienced RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) in action.
But an obstacle looms on the road to this RFID nirvana. Wal-Mart, Target, the Department of Defense and every other organization that plans to capture RFID data is coming to grips with the RFID data dilemma; the mammoth volumes of information that RFID will generate.
Sure, RFID is poised to help business reduce costs, fine-tune inventory management, fortify theft detection, and achieve new velocity and visibility across an extended supply chain of suppliers, partners, and customers.
But to realize those benefits, you have to plan for an intelligent nucleus in your RFID infrastructure -- data integration (DI) -- to pan gold from the RFID stream, and business intelligence (BI) to make sense of it all. Without these ingredients, RFID is bound to hit a red light on the road to ROI; if not fail to arrive completely.
Torrent of Information
The problem is that RFID, with capacity to store highly granular information, will generate somewhere between 10- and 100-times the data volume of conventional bar code technology. Plenty of estimates have put RFID quantities at terabytes a day for large retail and supply chain organizations -- an amount that dwarfs the data in many of today's systems and data warehouses.
Advanced RFID technology that can record environmental conditions, such as heat and light, will further swell data volumes. A healthcare distributor that envisions a sophisticated tracking system to ensure sensitive medical supplies remain at temperatures of 72 degrees Farenheit during shipping, for example, may be overwhelmed by quantities of non-essential data.
Amid the hoopla over RFID, much attention has been paid to passive/active tags, smart readers, and the benefits this technology promises to deliver to suppliers and purchasers. For example, IBM Global Services forecasts new revenue and reduced costs of $98,000 per year, per store, via RFID.
It is predicted that in retail alone, spending on RFID will swell to $1.3 billion a year by 2008, according to IT analyst firm IDC.
Fundamentally, though, RFID is about data. How enterprises approach the challenges RFID data poses will figure heavily in the fortunes or failings of any system. That's where data integration technology comes in. It is readily customized to capture, filter, and move just the right data at the right time in the right amounts. For instance, sift out the 500 megabytes from a stream of 500 gigabytes and your data storage costs just got cut by a factor of 1000.
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