High value assets and their movements are of particular interest to operations managers responsible for the usage of these assets within their facilities. There are many options and approaches for managing these assets. Savi Technology’s methodology is to take a “process approach” and let the process dictate the technology that best fits the application. Understanding a process is like understanding the terrain of a racing track. If you don’t spend time studying it, you may find yourself throwing a 12-cylinder turbo charged BMW onto an unpaved, off-road downhill and off a cliff.

The maturity needed for RFID is less about the technology and more about understanding how it can support business applications and the underlying processes. Without a well defined business case and the technology know-how, the application of RFID is nothing beyond an experiment on possibilities. Critics of RFID often point out that both active RFID and passive RFID technologies have had and their challenges living up to market expectations. The cost benefits in many cases still have problems living up to simple barcoding technology. What critics fail to realize is that this is just part of a constantly evolving technology hype cycle. Companies like Savi Technology, which provide an end-to-end solution with a variety of auto ID technologies, have thrived by focusing on the business processes over the enabling technologies. The purist debate on the use of active RFID versus passive RFID versus barcode lacks merit in the absence of understanding the business process. The discussions at Savi center around on what works and what’s the value regardless of the auto ID technology at the edge.

Tags: active RFID, barcode, passive RFID, RFID, wireless tracking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Savi Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.