Section 8.1. Slap-and-Ship Type Application

8.1. Slap-and-Ship Type Application

A slap-and-ship type RFID application involves attaching an RFID tag or a smart label to an item and shipping it to the customer who wanted this item tagged. This method represents the simplest way to achieve RFID compliance with minimum investment and implementation complexity. Such an application is either totally separate or minimally integrated with the business processes and back-end enterprise systems. As a result, such an application offers little or no benefit to the business itself that is implementing this application. From another perspective, a slap-and-ship application might be least disruptive to the business operations. It can also provide a company with valuable lessons in RFID should it want to take the application to the next level and integrate it into its business processes. In addition, a slap-and-ship type application provides a starting point for adopting RFID in a business. A business can take its slap-and-ship application and enhance it so that it can also benefit from it (besides just the customer who issued the mandate). A slap-and-ship application is generally not scalable, but is suitable when the volume of tagged items is low. However, it is laborious and susceptible to operator errors. This application type might turn out to be a liability in the long term, especially if competitors can successfully integrate RFID into their business processes to realize its benefits.

Coming back to the discussion of business justification of using RFID, the following sections provide in-depth information on this subject.