I happened to read some marvelous articles on how the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology was doing in various sectors, including service sector and commerce/industry sector. Though I was so very well aware of the role this particular ICT was playing not only in object tracking and supply chain management system, but in various other service sectors also, and the world was not enough. Just, to reckon and beckon a few:
- Traffic, Transportation and ticketing: This means Toll collection at highways and automatic vehicle location tracer. Obviously, this includes the ticketing system at
- Healthcare: Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals need technology to combat drug counterfeiting which needs improved visibility throughout the supply chain. Further, RFID Tags on the instruments and readers on the sterilization chambers and storage cabinets can help tell us the status of proper cleaning. Apart from this, the patient identification and location assistance are sometime very necessary in view of rendering special health services even from a distance.
- Warehousing including Warehousing and Transportation for PDS: RFID has proved itself a great facilitator for Public Distribution System. The various shortfalls of the PDS supply chain have been attempted to be trounced by the ICT tools, primarily online communications, mobile technology, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and RFID. Maharastra state government has also been pioneer in the initiative and has, reportedly, collaborated with Spanco to computerize complete PDS supply chain, through a grand ICT project, expected to complete by year 2012. The project shall use locationing technology such as RFID and GPS to identify and monitor the movement of the produce and streamline PDS activities. RFD is considered as one time solution to all supply chain related problems.
- Retailing and Supply Chain Management: Probably this is the most important sector, where RFID has already proved itself an integral part of the strategy of enhancement of total business revenues, by cutting across various expenses related with maintenance tracking and minimizing of store inventory. As a result, it provide vendors with real-time visibility of their inventory at various stages in the supply chain, which in turn, enables the vendors to minimize inventory ageing
I find, how beautifully the overall behavioral patterns of commerce could have been shaped into a mammoth success with the use of RFID tags. Various success stories of industries, service and government sector which made a high altitudinal difference in the balance sheets on one hand and quality of outcomes (not of outputs), as a result of introducing the RFID technology in their functional architecture have proved beyond doubt that RFID was a key enabler and prime factor to enthuse competitiveness in overall scenario of their attempts to accomplish something big, and be different from others.
My concern in writing this blog was somehow to explore various avenues and fields in various sectors where the technology was being used. In brevity, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology that is meant to make use of Radio Frequencies to identify uniquely and automatically some commodity, group of commodity, individual or group of items. A basic RFID system consists of three main components: a tag containing a microprocessor; a reader and its antennas; and one computer equipped with a middleware program where the corresponding software takes care of all the data and follows the business rules of that organization, as coded therein.
There is big difference, rather no comparison, between RFID and traditional Automatic Identification and Data Capture i.e. AIDC (bar coding and the like). The most important advantage of using RFID is that RFID tag requires no manual tracing since it creates an object level identification. The core competencies of RFID technology are, but not limited to, multiple tags objects reading capability; more and more data storage capability with data read/write capabilities interwoven.
In short, RFID is a tool which provides a 'unique identification' or UID or AADHAR for living and non-living, both. It is very cost-effective in terms of the results it provides for decision making on one hand and monitoring various objectives and parameter, on the other, of any organization of various fields as mentioned above. The real-time data transfer and data collection ensuring sharing thereof among multiple stakeholders including intra-and inter-organizational business processes is possible through RFID.
As per a report from Business Standard, three key factors have driven a significant increase in RFID usage, i.e decreased cost of equipment and tags, increased performance to a reliable 99.9 per cent and a stable international standard around UHF passive tags. Passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) tags cost anywhere between Rs 30 and Rs 80 per tag but can last for up to two decades. Similar Chinese tags cost Rs 12-20 but their range and durability could be lower. This report says that the estimated market size of the RFID industry in India
But the use of RFID in one field, which has probably been unnoticed hitherto in Madhya Pradesh, and which prompted to write me this blog was: RFID IN CATTLES, rather RFID TECHNOLOGY IN THE SERVICE OF DAIRY SECTOR. As per an article from rfidjounal, tracking cows and other milch animals in dairies was one of the first applications of radio frequency identification. Currently, RFID is being employed by many dairies worldwide, for a variety of applications. Chitale Dairy, in Maharashtra (India ), is using a system developed at Bombay Veterinary College that combines RFID and cell-phone technologies to track data related to the health of cows. A RFID tag is punched on ear of cow and it sends information about her daily dietary needs and feeding details, among many other information, to a radio sensor located inside the farm premises. This, in turn, communicates with computer systems at the BG Chitale Dairy located in Bhilavadi village of Sangli , Maharashtra . The data collected by this system is then accessed in real time by dairy managers and other supervisors for carrying out specific activities, such as monitoring the health and changing the nutritional mix. This process is done for all the cattle in the Chitale Dairy.
Thousands of milk farmers in
