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What are the application areas and verticals where RFID is likely to
generate momentum in the coming years?
Although RFID is still at a nascent stage, there are several killer
applications that will prove extremely useful in the Indian environment, across
different verticals. Although retail and manufacturing continue to be the
cornerstone for RFID's success in India, there are numerous
applications-both business and consumer-that can be built around RFID over
the years.
An emerging vertical is that of government machinery. In a traditional setup,
RFID can greatly enhance productivity levels. For instance, with the help of
RFID, tracking of important documents, legal files, and health records, becomes
easier and faster. Thereby, improving the time taken to complete all tasks.
Several government related agencies deal with reusable assets, which BEA
believes to be a focus area for RFID adoption.
 In general terms, we foresee 'supply chain visibility' and 'reusable
asset tracking' as key solutions that have high applicability to the Indian
market. BEA's software provides the key components for enterprises to gain the
benefits from deploying visibility and tracking solutions.
What are some of the technology challenges faced by enterprises
implementing RFID and how do they tackle these?
The presence of RFID technology can improve forecasting, pedigree tracking,
and container security, while reducing problems such as shrinkage, recalls, and
out-of-stock goods. The result is billions of dollars in supply-chain savings.
However, as RFID technology becomes more pervasive, its distributed nature
combined with heavy transaction volume, raises several important technological
challenges.
Scalability and Availability: As the use of RFID technology grows, companies
will be required to handle inputs from thousands of readers distributed across
supply chains worldwide; rapid growth will challenge scalability. To ensure data
is delivered reliably to the appropriate destinations across an infrastructure
and application stack, it is necessary to eliminate single points of failure at
the edge layer, the integration layer and all points in between.
Security: With RFID the vast amount of potentially sensitive data involved
makes security a critical aspect of. At the lowest level, secure administration
prevents readers from being turned off and items stolen. The administrative
interface, therefore, must be protected by authentication, authorization, or
audit, potentially over SSL (Secure Socket Layer). Additionally, it is important
to leverage standards based protocols, incorporating security features, to
transport the data between the edge and the enterprise.
Interoperability and Standardization: There is an urgent need to set common
standards that meet the requirements. As economies increasingly depend on the
global trading system, the need for interoperability among standards, and
harmonization of standards, has never been so pressing. There is need to agree
on a common international framework. For instance, the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) is working on standards for tracking
goods in the supply chain using high-frequency tags.
Integration: Some form of enterprise application integration (EAI) and
enterprise service bus (ESB) is needed to get the full value from RFID events.
Simply dispatching events from the edge to a series of applications is not an
adequate solution, as it raises issues related to security, reliable messaging,
performance, availability, adapter connectivity, business process definition,
and so on.
Administration: As RFID is enabled across supply chains, the ability to
administer across the entire stack becomes necessary. At a high level, there are
two aspects to RFID monitoring and administration: device management and
provisioning of configuration to the readers. Administrators require a single
interface for managing the entire stack, which sits inside a centralized portal
framework.
Shipra Arora
shipraa@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
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