MANUFACTURERS who are waiting for a mandate before researching RFID technology and how it can improve their operations could be missing out on one of industry’s most exciting new tools.
According to Rohit Nagarajan, Oracle’s Singapore-based business development manager, mobile & sensor solutions for the Asia Pacific region, RFID can have a long lasting positive impact on a business. “It’s not something to be afraid of, but something to embrace and look forward to.
“Equally important to understand is that it encompasses business and technology. It goes beyond just the hardware into ways it can impact companies’ existing systems as well as the way they do business today,” Nagarajan told Manufacturers’ Monthly on his recent visit to Australia.
He says objects in the real world are increasingly interacting autonomously with systems in ways that increase the efficiency and immediacy of many business processes. “This real time response afforded by sensors like RFID are beginning to deliver a wide range of tangible benefits to businesses.”
But don’t wait for a mandate is Nagarajan’s advice. “It’s always beneficial to stay ahead of the curve as far as most levels of technology are concerned, and RFID is no different.
“But it is important to identify a pain point and how RFID is going to resolve that pain. It is something companies can start looking at for internal benefit which will give them an advantage when the mandate does come.”
Nagarajan says most analysts advocate asset management as a good place to start. “There is significant pain point there in terms of visibility of the assets.
“If companies are able to provide a higher level of visibility into their utilisation, that could provide significant cost savings. Various studies have identified this area as being able to provide a faster ROI and see the benefits quicker then some of the other open loop solutions.
“However, the biggest gains are when information is shared between partners upstream and downstream in a supply chain. That’s when you get real benefits from RFID.”
Nagarajan advises customers not to look at RFID as a bar code replacement. “That’s not what RFID is. It’s an automated data capture device, yes, but the benefit it can add is completely different.
“We actually see both systems going hand in hand for quite a while until the technology matures. All our solutions are presently geared to supporting both bar codes and RFID. Bar codes went through their own cycle of adoption, RFID will be the same,” Nagarajan said.
To handle the huge amount of data generated by the RFID tags, Oracle has developed a sensor data hub which is fed data via a sensor edge server. The server, which is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack, is the middleware component responsible for bridging the gaps between sensors and the IT systems.
“The sensor edge server is responsible for various things including physically connecting to readers, filtering reads, device management, etc. It's also responsible for feeding the data collected through multiple readers to a single hub, namely the sensor data hub.
“The data hub, built on Oracle’s Database 10, acts as a single source of truth for all sensor data in the organisation,” Nagarajan said.
Regarding costs, he says these components are the least expensive part of the whole solution. “In fact in terms of expense, in most cases, a company will have already have 90% of the infrastructure needed.”
The most significant investment required, Nagarajanis says, is ‘think-through’ and the re-engineering to get the RFID information integrated with existing systems.
“The biggest benefit is what companies do with the information itself. It could be inventory management, could be in maximising yields in WIP (Work in Progress). It’s how and what companies do with stored information that can give them the level of benefit they want to get out of it.”
According to Nagarajan, information gained from RFID pilot studies fall into two buckets.
“One is technology, understanding what works best in different environments, what kind of hardware, tags and readers. Then under the technology umbrella itself, what are the touch points that users have in an organisation.
“People now realise it is important to connect with what they have today. Users can’t operate a RFID pilot in a silo, because then all they are doing is hardware testing,” Nagarajan explained.