RFID Technology (Please login)

New toolkits interfacing with RFID technology, growing adoption of standards across industries, and the falling cost of tags and sensor hardware have lessened RFID development time and cost. This has led to better RFID project management, smoother development and planning phases and a more rapid ROI. These lessened costs have been further aided by RFID technology developments that include increased memory capacity, decreased read/write times over a wider distance. With these advancements and lowered costs, there are a growing number of potential RFID applications and marketplaces that should be receptive to this RFID technology.

Here are some guidelines you may want to consider for your RFID technology project:

• Don't procrastinate. It's highly possible your competitors are not. Get the jump on your competitors, instead.
• Plan your project. Detail your objectives, development phases and timeframe, evaluation points and anticipated costs. Assess levels of productivity and plan for scalability, if appropriate.
• Use knowledgeable consultants, if necessary. The right experts can greatly enhance productivity and increase your chance of completing a successful project.
• Don't try to do everything in-house if you don't have the expertise. This will hurt you in the long run. Instead, find an RFID consultant or partner with the knowledge you require and that you can learn from (if you wish to).
• Test, test, test. In your project plan, include phase tests where you can verifiably test the anticipated progress (including development time and cost) of the project and the effectiveness of your RFID technology implementation. Once your project is near completion, run a limited test to obtain crucial feedback. It's much easier and cheaper to modify a project still under development than re-opening a completed one.
• If applicable, always keep compliance in mind. In many cases the success of your project will be judged by it. In this situation, you may want to extend your degree of compliancy, if possible. It might be important in the future should the compliancy requirements change and also, can provide an additional selling point.

Copyright, The Productivity Institute LLC, 2008.