The Pros and Cons of RFID in Supply Chain Management

This paper presents the pros and cons of using radio-frequency identification (RFID) in supply chain management (SCM). While RFID has a greater number of benefits than its predecessor, the bar code, it currently comes at a price that many businesses still consider prohibitive. On the one hand, RFID is advantageous because it does not require line-of-sight scanning, it acts to reduce labor levels, enhances visibility, and improves inventory management. On the other hand, RFID is presently a costly solution, lacking standardization, it has a small number of suppliers developing end-to-end solutions, suffers from some adverse deployment issues, and is clouded by privacy concerns. Irrespective of these factors, the ultimate aim of RFID in SCM is to see the establishment of item-level tracking which should act to revolutionize SCM practices, introducing another level of efficiencies never before seen.