RFID: Wait and the competition will thrash you

The time is now for RFID, according to experts at today's GS1 UK EPCglobal RFID Conference in London, who warned that those who don't take a carpe diem attitude to the technology will find themselves on the receiving end of a thrashing from their competition.

Simon Langford, manager of RFID strategy at uber-retailer Wal-Mart, said companies need to get involved with the technology before too long.

"Don't wait and sit back because the competition is going to get further away from you," he said.

Chris Adcock, president of RFID standards body EPCglobal, cautioned that those hoping for an easy ride to an RFID implementation will be disappointed.

"There is no plug-and-play solution," he told delegates. "One thing that you learn from the companies that are the most advanced in the use of this technology is that the size of the benefit often tracks with the amount of work done to find it... [that means] heavy lifting and hard work but there's gold at the end of the rainbow."

Adcock added that companies hoping to gain from studying other businesses' experiences of using the tracking technology are on the wrong track - because the big boys will keep their lips sealed about their RFID secrets.

"Many companies are saying they will wait and see. You may not see, because the companies that have done the heavy lifting and the hard work are not going to be quick to expose everything they've discovered and found out to the broader community," he said. "There's not going to be an open book."

Despite the retail industry's burgeoning fondness for RFID, 'wait and see' remains the stance of the pharmaceutical industry towards the would-be barcode replacement.

John Morgan, global RFID project director for AstraZeneca, said: "Right now we're in piloting stage, we're learning."

He expects it will be 2008 before the pharmaceutical industry seizes RFID with as much enthusiasm as the consumer goods industry.

Morgan said: "There will be wider adoption [between 2008 and 2010], more products and you will start to see some interest from Europe, which, I feel, is watching and waiting to see what happens in the US."

Morgan put the Europe's coyness down to a lack of leadership. "There's no clear mandate," he said. "We don't have a Wal-Mart."