Chapter4.Application Areas

Chapter 4. Application Areas

The potential application of RFID technology is limited only to one's imagination. Although a popular belief holds that RFID is best suited to supply-chain management or consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries, the range of current RFID applications goes far beyond these areas. In fact, a variety of established RFID application types have already been deployed successfully in real-world environments. An application type consists of several different application members that share the same characteristics of the application type. These application types are denoted by the term prevalent in this book to emphasize that these are the most commonly applied areas of RFID today. Note, however, that this is not an official term, but is used for the sake of convenience.

The full potential offered by RFID does not stop at the prevalent application types. RFID is an emerging technology, and as such, tremendous potential lies ahead to apply it to areas that can utilize the benefits of the technology. Currently, some of these areas are in the prototyping or planning stage, some have just started to be explored, and others are not yet getting sufficient attention from the industry or from vendors. In short, these application types need to mature to a point of validation (both technological and relating to business processes) before being rolled out into production. This book calls these application types emerging, to highlight the fact that most of these application types have yet to become prevalent application types. Again, the term emerging is not an official term, but is used here for convenience.

Whereas a whole application type can be emerging, some members of a particular prevalent application type can be emerging, too (item tracking and tracing, for example, and inventory monitoring and control, discussed later in this chapter). When RFID begins to be used in these types of applications, a whole new suite of yet undiscovered applications might unfold. An application at a prototype stage today might very well be rolled out as a business application in the near future. Therefore, the application types and members belonging to prevalent and emerging types will vary over time based on technological advances and the willingness of the business community to apply the technology to solve new problems.

This chapter discusses examples of both prevalent and emerging applications, as of this writing, to give you an idea of the application potential of the technology. This book uses the terms prevalent and emerging for both application types and members belonging to application types. You will understand the distinction between these two entities from the context. Note that this chapter does not attempt to list every RFID application that exists today or that might exist in the future. Instead, this chapter covers some of the most important applications that exist today and that might be possible in the future, with the hope that you can identify similar applications and associate them with the ones discussed here.