Winning and losing with RFID

As with any new technology, RFID has areas of tremendous success and places where it may not be as functional. One success story is in the apparel industry, where research firm IDTechEx predicts 4.6 billion RFID labels will be used in 2016. And that’s a market penetration of only 15 percent. The technology works for clothing because of the wide range of colours, sizes and styles, which are incredibly hard to track through the supply chain any other way. Stock accuracy can be as high as 95 percent, minimizing costly out of stock situations, which in the world of ‘fast fashion’ can be deadly to a brand. But while RFID has been influential in supply chain management and is key to current market trends, there are places where it just doesn’t add value.