Anonymous

Cumbria

IT

I work for a smallish supplier to a number of large chains, and from experience I can tell you that this will come, and we will bear the cost. Already we are forced to use EDI systems that gain us little benefit, but cost us both financially and in administration. In some cases the EDI requirements are nice and simple so at least we get to use the same system for most of our customers, but in a few cases they want so much more than our business systems can provide the data for and so we are forced to use their 'proprietry' EDI package and effectively duplicate all our business functions - in these cases it is clearly a case of shifting the work from them to us, not reducing the work required. Unless you are big enough to afford proper integration, the work saving benefits of EDI are a myth - the same work is done, but now the supplier does both their own data entry, and separately they do the same data entry for the customer.

RFID will be the same, sooner or later one of the large players will just turn round and tell us when we are going to start tagging stuff - on a do it or don't deal with us basis. And I don't expect we'll get any more respurces in IT to deal with it either.