More than 50% of the manufacturers surveyed in a recently released survey see significant expansion of RFID deployments over the next five years, with respondents saying they will have between two and ten RFID-enabled sites, supported by their own local area networks by 2008.
According to the study, “The RFID Benchmark Series: Scaling RFID Implementations from Pilot to Production,” by the AberdeenGroup, the most important issue relates to implementation strategies and considering differences in processes and workflows that can be found at various locations, even within the same job function.
Study findings stress taking care in RFID technology selection that will provide both flexibility and scalability across the enterprise. Emphasis is given to researching automated technologies that can manage multiple location tasks, such as bill of materials, facilities, configuration and other administrative tasks.
Fifteen percent of study respondents fall into the "Aggressive Adopters" category, predicting that RFID technology will be installed in more than 30 sites by 2011. The largest group falls into the middle category, "Average Adopters." Approximately 55% of these respondents predict that RFID will be installed in 10 to 30 sites by 2011.
The top five factors reported for implementation included material and product tracking, security, asset management, increased visibility to to business events and fulfilling customer mandates taking up the largest reason for implementation at 69%.More than half of the survey respondents cite a critical lack of internal technical expertise in RFID as a major hurdle to implementation. Finding cost effective RFID management across multiple sites also remains a significant issue for many respondents as well.The complete study can be found at: https://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/RA_RFIDPilot_JF_3149.asp.