|
The Savant Newsletter,
July 6, 2004. Savant Company Inc. , Your High-Technology Intelligence
Partner for Leading-Edge Markets
RFID Data Management Challenges—7 Rules
That Will Help You!
As RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)
gains significant momentum due to rapid adoption of the technology by
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, and Target Corp., data
management and its integration through an efficient supply chain management
become more and more obvious. Savant Market Intelligence predicts that
manufacturers will spend as much as $6 billion over the next five years on
RFID-based infrastructure for data collection and data management.
With RFID, companies will have much
better capabilities to store and retrieve information throughout the entire
manufacturing, distribution, and selling cycles than the current
barcode/scanner systems allow. What data should be collected, stored, and
shared? At each step, who owns what data? What IT infrastructure is needed
to effectively deal with the sheer volume of data? And most importantly,
what business processes during the manufacturing, distribution, and selling
need to be changed to enable companies to effectively integrate RFID data
management and act upon this information?
Apply these 7 practices to help your
company develop and implement an RFID data management strategy:
1. Train your team
RFID is a new
technology, and there are many options, possibilities, and technical
considerations that must be thoroughly reviewed and addressed by individuals
who understand your business processes. Training your staff on all aspects
of RFID will insure much better advanced planning and overall business
efficiency.
2. Choose the right RFID
technology and the right RFID partner
There are many RFID providers, but which ones have the best/right technology
for your application? Choosing the right RFID technology partner will play
an important role during data storage, retrieving, and management. Look for
companies that offer total system solutions and well-defined modules to
interface with your existing IT/databases subsystem.
3. Leverage the existing
equipments/databases
To minimize costs, make sure that your RFID partner provides you with all
the necessary interfaces so that data gathered from RFID-based systems are
seamlessly integrated and used in your existing databases and business
processes. Your RFID value-added provider should not expect you to overhaul
your entire IT infrastructure.
4. Let the business drive
what data needs to be collected
Just because you have a bigger disk drive doesn’t mean you collect useless
data in your system. And just because RFID allows you to gather more data,
you shouldn’t overwhelm your systems with information that will not improve
your overall business processes, productivity, and profitability.
5. Understand your data
ownership and security challenges in advance
What data should be collected, stored, and shared? RFID is forcing companies
to redefine the rules of data management for collaboration in terms of the
how supply chain related-data is gathered, stored, protected, and exchanged.
A well-defined data management system must have clear provisions for data
ownership, security, and exchanged.
6. Let your experts
determine the business rules for data collection
Your trained staff is familiar with your business needs and should make the
decisions on what data should be collected, when data should be collected,
what data should be stored in which system/server (and why), and so on.
Training and enabling your team will play a significant role in the
successful implementation of your data management model.
7. Develop performance
measurements via effective data management
Gathering more data in your databases (or in your systems) will not help the
company's productivity and profitability if the data is not interpreted
correctly, shared promptly, and used effectively to improve the business
processes. Effective performance measurements methodology and tools such as
intelligence dashboard must be in place to accurately show/gauge RFID’s
benefits in different steps of your business. This methodology must be part
of your new RFID-based data management design from start.
Farhad Mafie
|
