A contribution from our RFID Specialist, Clyde Church
On a recent sales trip to Toronto, a fellow sales rep and I visited a large industrial plant that was interested in RFID. The plant is one of 17 business units and seven manufacturing groups which service these business units.
When we met with them, we provided samples of our products and answered some very broad RFID questions about tags, readers, materials and software. There seemed to be some reluctance or skepticism about RFID, but we couldn't be absolutely sure of the source of that skepticism.
During a later Q&A, we found out they were happy with their software and bar code tagging system, but were still interested in incorporating RFID. We also discovered that a previous vendor had given them the impression that they needed major modifications to their software system in order to incorporate RFID. This vendor had placed a fear of RFID in their minds because of the time, cost and complexity of integrating new plant operations software, in addition to adopting RFID technology.
Since we were trying to promote our RFID labels instead of software, and they wanted to find a way to use RFID without a major software development project, we searched for a way to accomplish both goals. We suggested keeping the existing software and adding a couple of fields to their database to capture the information from the RFID readers. From there, they can simply incorporate an RFID tag with their existing bar code tag. They would then read their printed bar code label and our RFID tag serial number and associate the two numbers in their database with only a minor software change.
The moral to the story is that there were hidden barriers to adoption of RFID for this customer; however, with proper qualification of the application, these obstacles were by no means insurmountable.