Press Report

RFID. Tracing supported by radio frequency of the flow of goods still suffers from teething troubles

(Die Presse 05.2006) The trust which gets put in the innovation potential of the new tracking technology can also be seen at this year's CeBIT in Hannover, the world's largest high-tech show, where for the first time a separate exhibition area was dedicated to the topic Automotive ID/RFID. However, the euphoria which the sector created roughly two years ago due to the virtually unlimited application areas has rather given way today to a sober realism.

Oswald Werle, CEO inet-logistics, can refer to much better experiences. inet-logistics runs several projects with big industrial concerns who were all enabled to seamlessly track the journey of containers from the place of departure to the final destination, for example to Brazil. However, only active RFID-tags get used here. As those tags have an independent battery supply which their passive counterparts do not have they do not only have a broader reach (up to 300 meters) but the reading quality is much better as well. Furthermore they can record data continuously during their journey (temperature, vibrations, humidity, etc.), they can be used hundreds of times and they have a product life of approximately six years. "However, it has to pay off as well. Therefore, only in a few individual sectors it is now possible to work in a cost-covering way, for example during the seamless monitoring of cold chains in the food or pharmaceutical industry or with regard to expensive consumer goods.

Although the system may be expensive at the moment - the future potential of this technology is so high that in the course of the next years many companies will jump on this bandwagon for sure," says Werle confidently. "In the first instance it is however necessary to identify those areas for which it makes sense and where it can be implemented profitably."