Sense and respond
- Article 3 of 26
- M-iD, December 2003
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) isn't ready yet for tracking documents - but it will be soon, say its proponents.
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Even that price tag may not be cheap enough. “It's still not likely to make economic sense,” argues David Gingell, vice president of marketing for enterprise content management software company Documentum. “Consider a confidential case file in a firm of lawyers. The file is likely to contain tens or hundreds of pieces of paper - many materials for the case and highly important. Sure, you want to know what happens to that piece of paper, so if you could tag each piece, you could track its movements,” he says. But with hundreds of sheets to tag, there is the cost not just of the tags themselves but the associated work of physically tagging each sheet, he says. When barcoding systems can print a code onto a piece of paper at the same time as the content of the document for no extra cost, there is little incentive to switch to RFID tagging.
It is this additional implementation cost that is preventing many companies from using RFID technology. FileTrail's Pemberton says that while 50% of the company's customers have expressed an interest in the technology, the thought of having to 'retrofit' documents with tags has put off many of them. “The concept of having to go back and apply these tags to ten thousand or a hundred thousand or five million items that they're currently tracking with barcodes is just completely prohibitive,” he says. He believes that it will only be when the cost of getting an RFID tag onto a document falls to the same kinds of levels that are envisaged for the tags themselves that their use will take off.
As a result, the main adopters of the technology are not larger companies with many documents that they need to track, but small law firms, human resources departments and government departments that have a sufficient number of documents that they need a system to track them, but do not have so many that the cost of adding the tags to the documents will be excessive.
A possible solution to this dilemma has come from Hitachi. Its Mu RFID chip has an integrated antenna and measures just 16mm square, meaning it is capable of being embedded in paper, potentially when the paper is being manufactured. “At the moment, it is looking like it will add up to 5¢ to the cost of a piece of A4 paper,” reveals Hitachi's Jones. “But a lot of people have this big pre-conceived notion of cost being a barrier. It's not cost, but return on investment that's important. For a piece of paper that's just going to go into a photocopier, 5¢ may seem like a lot. But if you're adding it to a hundred-million dollar bond or a €500 note, it's just peanuts.”
Hitachi is working with partners to try to create a viable process for embedding Mu chips into paper during the production process and Jones estimates a commercial solution is between six and 18 months away. However, it is already in talks with Japanese and European currency printers to embed the chips into high denomination Yen and Euro notes.
As the price of tags drops, many organisations are likely to look at RFID tags as a potential addition to their document tracking strategy, using barcodes to track older or less important documents and RFID to monitor live and valuable files, albeit it at the file folder rather than the sheet-level. But as the tags themselves become smaller and paper production processes enable the embedding of tags at source, the potential for far wider use of RFID technology will increase dramatically and it will not be long before the embedded chip will become as ubiquitous as the barcode.
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