Metro Finds RFID Accuracy Not A Problem
Written by Evan SchumanJune 29th, 2007
With the $81 Billion Euro retail giant Metro Group having formally gone into full-fledged RFID deployment, a senior executive there says the efficiencies the chain saw in trials was too compelling to not deploy.
The chain has informed all of its suppliers that they need to ship all RFID pallets to Metro fully RFID tagged by October 1, 2007, said Gerd Wolfram, an IT managing director for the chain.
One of the key hurdles to full-scale RFID deployments with U.S. retailers has been low read accuracy rates, but Wolfram said that wasn't what his people found in European testing. "It's not a problem at all on the pallet level," he said, adding that pallet-level read rates were "about 100 percent."
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One Comment | Read Metro Finds RFID Accuracy Not A Problem
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July 1st, 2007 at 6:38 am
Mr. Wolfram compares RFID read accuracy to manual counting and keyboard entry. However, the current state of the art is the use of Barcode and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange).
If Metro is not using EDI, then their zeal for RFID is completely understandable. In the U.S. EDI is very common. RFID had the potential to eliminate Barcode and EDI with the promise of reading the EPC of every case in a pallet load. This level of automation would not only eliminate to need for manually reading and counting cases but would also eliminate the need for Barcode, EDI, and ASN (Advance Shipping Notice). To realize the efficiencies of full automation, in the supply chain, the read rate needs to be 100%. The poor read rate of RFID makes this impossible, and RFID is now proposed as a supplement to Barcode and EDI requiring ASNs to fill the data gaps produced by RFID.
In this role, the extra cost of RFID cannot be justified.