Sense and respond

• Article 3 of 26
• M-iD, December 2003
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 184K

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“The concept of RFID came to my attention three years ago as a possibility in records management,” recalls Keers. “It requires no action by anybody - if it works properly - for transactions to be recorded. I discovered a German company called Findentity. When we publicised it, we were deluged with [expressions of] interest.”

Unfortunately, that interest soon dropped off. One reason for this was the gap between customer expectation and reality. “It's one of those systems where often customer expectation instantly jumps to a level that is higher than the ability of the system to deliver,” says Keers. “People are interested in it because it's state-of-the-art and high tech. The assumption is that it's magic and knows where everything is all the time. But it isn't like that,” he says.

With the passive RFID tags typically used in a records management environment, the RFID scanner has to be within 30cm and 35cm of the tag for identify and locate it. As a result, Keers found himself having to disabuse potential customers of their overly optimistic assumptions. “When you're 'negative selling' - telling the customer that your system can do less than he thought - and bringing his expectations down, it's not an ideal situation,” Keers points out.

Tom Pemberton, chief technology officer of US-based FileTrail, experienced similar problems when the company used its web site to market RFID technology.

“We've been pushing RFID for document management since 1999 or 2000,” he recalls. “We saw the potential to leverage the passive technology and make it truly passive - have tags on everything so people didn't have to interact with their computers any more. But that's not a practicality yet, and back then it wasn't even a reality.”

FileTrail, he says, tried to convince potential customers to invest in gate technology - where users are forced to walk through a gate with an RFID scanner built in - and put pictures of the gates on its web site. “That was what people understood and that's what people wanted; they'd seen how they walk through gates at the supermarket that detect if you're stealing a steak or not.”

However, as the technology stood then, it could not live up to that promise. “If you had ten file folders in your hand or ten objects that were tagged and you walked through the gates really quickly because you were on your way to a meeting, there was a really high probability that not all ten items would be read. And if you know the system isn't 100% reliable, then nobody's going to rely on it,” says Pemberton.

Reality bites
Nevertheless, while customer expectations of the technology have been high, RFID technology has advanced to an extent where it can meet most of these expectations or at least come close. Now the main barriers to adoption are the cost of the tags themselves and the cost of implementation.

“The problem we have with RFID,” confesses Keers of Cavetab, “is the cost of the transponders to be honest. Although people are talking about price coming down rapidly, my experience to date is that the tags are costing us about €1 each, which is horrendously expensive when you have many, many records. The breakthrough will come when they come down to a few pence.”

IT market research company AMR Research also finds price a significant issue for many companies interested in RFID technology. “Readers are still expensive,” argues researcher John Fontanella, “and unless you are buying RFID tags by the hundreds of millions, the 50¢ to 75¢ unit cost is well beyond a threshold that makes them a compelling value.” Fontanella does not believe that tags costing a more palatable 5¢ will be available until 2006.

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