Other Standardization Initiatives

In addition to ISO and EPCglobal, several other organizations have developed RFID as well as automatic data capture related standards. Although the comprehensive treatment of these is out of the scope of this book, we mention a few of them here.

A key player in the development of ISO standards has been the United States' representative, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). ANSI is a private, non-profit organization chartered with administering and coordinating the U.S. standardization system. Particularly relevant to RFID is the standard known as ANSI 256 (INCITS 256-2001), which establishes a technical standard for a family of compatible RFID devices. It defines a common Application Programming Interface (API) between RFID tag and reader software. Eventually, this standard should provide such APIs for several different UHF and HF frequency bands. APIs for frequencies such as 2.45GHz and 433MHz have already been provided.

Another player in the RFID standards development is China. With thousands of factories in China manufacturing goods that are exported all over the globe, it is only natural that companies looking to gain total supply chain visibility start by tagging the products when they are manufactured in China. It costs more to tag these products after they arrive in the U.S. than to tag them at the time of manufacturing. In addition, the Chinese manufacturers can use RFID to gain visibility into their domestic supply chain. However, China lacks RFID standards as well as open frequencies for tag-reader communication. As a result, relatively fewer companies have deployed RFID in their Chinese operations. To remedy this situation, the Chinese government set up a working group in early 2004 to define RFID standards and protocols for the country. It is unclear how these standards will interoperate with EPCglobal and in what timeframe.

Alignment between ISO and EPCglobal standards (and even some of the country-specific ones such as the Chinese standards) would be a huge step forward for successful deployment of RFID on a global basis. It is important enough that large customers, such as the United States Department of Defense (DoD), are encouraging this movement. But what should you do in the mean time? To find out, proceed to the next section.