Issue #129 | Jan. 11, 2008 | by Venkat Krishnamurthy
RFID drives organizational agility, yet typical RFID deployments lack the very flexibility they are intended to provide. Some organizations spend months or years and countless dollars developing a custom solution, while others accept the limitations of an off-the-shelf, standalone offering. Flexible design environments strike a balance between the two, providing a tailored solution in less time.
Let’s start with three basic facts:
- RFID solutions are not one-size-fits all deployments
- Your RFID-enabled processes will change over time
- You need to prove RFID value today to expand your deployment tomorrow
One of our customers that implemented our RFID applications across multiple facilities offers a good example. Their challenge was managing incoming parts from numerous suppliers, where each supplier packages and delivers its products in a slightly different manner. It was imperative they have a single, configurable solution that would enable them to operate effectively with all suppliers once the new RFID system was in place, without having to call
us back because a new supplier presented them with an unexpected wrinkle.
Standalone, off-the shelf solutions generally don’t need retooling; but your current processes may need to be retooled to use them. When you run into issues in data exchange with your enterprise applications, applications can take longer to deploy.
The Only Constant in Business is Change
Your custom solution is in production, and you don’t predict major process modifications over the next year. Once processes are hard-coded, you may be surprised how minor changes impact your RFID-enabled application in these circumstances:
- Start accepting custom orders and decide to add process steps for order verification so that stack lights on the production floor alert staff when orders are incomplete.
- A new client requires Advance Shipping Notifications (ASNs) which need to be cross-checked with your Warehouse Management System.
- You switch suppliers and add new quality checks at the start of production and at final assembly, validating component parts against the Bill of Materials stored in your ERP system.
These business process
changes would require you to adapt your RFID solution. A custom solution would most likely mean recoding with the concomitant time, resources and cost.
A flexible design environment should enable you to modify a few configuration parameters with minimal effort.
With a flexible design environment, you can be up and running in weeks instead of months, and focus more time on driving operational efficiencies – and tangible results. A shorter deployment cycle translates into an improved ROI. Spending time, money and resources at the front end for custom development (or for process retooling) gives you higher costs to amortize.
Three Factors to Consider when Deploying New Applications
Remember that RFID implementations are really about business process changes at the edge of the enterprise – the loading dock, the factory floor, the sales floor. It’s true that from a physical perspective, tags, readers and other IT infrastructure are involved; but fundamentally, RFID is about enabling business process change.
Given the extraordinary costs in time and money of customizing code or outgrowing a standalone solution,
organizations seeking to undertake RFID projects should consider these three factors:
- Maintainability – How easy will the solution be to maintain from a central location, across multiple facilities?
- Configurability – Can you configure the RFID solution at multiple sites with varying requirements without programming or implementing different solutions?
- Extensibility – As business processes change, as they invariably will, do you have to resort to custom coding to continue getting value from your investment? How modular is the RFID solution design?
How to recognize flexible design
When shopping for a configurable solution, to give you a flexible design environment, the answers to these questions are critical:
- Can this handle multiple production systems on disparate platforms?
- Can it accommodate a wide variety of readers?
- Is there an existing, labor-intensive receiving process to account for?
- Is there a requirement for visual inspection upon receipt of goods?
- Must you record the attributes of objects?
Above all,
take into account the need to set rules, alerts and thresholds for exception handling.
Building Flexibility into Your RFID Implementation
First-generation RFID solutions did (and still do) require custom coding to implement, often by consultants doing one-off engagements. As a result, solutions become brittle at the edge and can be difficult and expensive to maintain and upgrade, thus making it impossible to extend the business process.
More recently, flexible design environments providing configurable solutions have become available. Often they use a high-level graphical design environment that provides drag and drop interfaces allowing users to specify and connect processes easily. This eliminates low-level custom coding which typically requires more time, more resources and more money.
As long as businesses and their trading partners operate in unique ways, RFID solutions will need to adapt to them. The only question is how they go about doing it. These days, flexible and high-level design environments can take most of the pain out of the process.
Venkat Krishnamurthy is chief technology officer for OATSystems, a provider of
RFID solutions (www.oatsystems.com).
