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RFID: Changing the Face
Of
Supply Chain Management

Abstract:
RFID is the latest magic bulletin in the technological landscape that has the potential to make a sweeping paradigm shift in the way any organizations approach their supply chain. Leading the way in embracing this technology are retailers, particularly Wal-Mart and their suppliers. This case explores some of the issues and concerns in the implementation of RFID solutions.

Managing the Supply Chain
In today's dynamic world, organizations in their quest for excellence are investing in tools and systems that optimize their processes and have made significant progress by employing various technologies for increasing efficiencies and reducing costs. The intense competitive landscape makes it imperative for all businesses to continuously evolve with an emphasis on optimizing all levels of the value chain. These factors led to the evolution of the concept of supply chain management which in turn, provides the next logical stage in the evolution of competitiveness for the manufacturing organization. Supply chain management is essentially integrating suppliers to the end consumers and emphasizes the need for collaboration to optimize the whole system. The basic aim of any supply chain management function is to make the organization more agile and nimble footed to respond to drastically changing consumer preferences by capturing the data of material flow at all levels of the value chain.

The Reality
But are the supply chains working at 100% or even 90% expected levels?Not quite. The reasons for this are varied; let’s see the reasons and their impact.

Figure 1

The problem can be put in better perspective with respect to retail environment where there are almost lakhs of SKUs to be handled. The problem of stock outs has a high negative impact on the top-line as well as bottom-line, according to a survey carried out by HBR. The survey had a sample size of 71,000 respondents in around 29 countries....