Information Systems Management

EWLY EMERGING WIRELESS TECHnologies, one of which is radio frequency identification (RFID), hold the promise of closing the information gaps in the supply chain. The applications of RFID are wide-ranging and include the manufacturing and distribution of physical goods such as automobiles and transmission assembly (Mintchell, 2002), minting bank notes (Anonymous2, 2002), oil exploration (Anonymous1, 2002), shipping and port operations (D’Amico, 2002; Dornheim, 2002), and pharmaceutical packaging processes (Forcinio, 2002), among others. Keen and Macintosh (2001) consider RFID technologies as part of the “universal infrastructure” that will support mobile commerce. These authors also foresee RFID as an example of technologies that introduce “process freedoms,” that is, those with the ability to add value along the entire supply chain and related logistical operations and business relationships by enabling the mobility of critical elements — the business activities, people, information, documents, and communications — needed for a more effective business process design. Given the recent mandates for suppliers to use RFID technologies by Wal-Mart and others, it appears that an initial phase of widespread diffusion of RFID technologies is at hand. An RFID is one type of auto-identification technology that uses radio waves to identify individual physical objects. In this article, however, the term “auto-ID” refers to a specific technology prototype developed by the AutoID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and allied research universities, and now supported by EPCglobal, a new nonprofit organization. This article focuses on the application of RFID in logistical operations. First we summarize the key elements of RFID applications and summarize five case examples to demonstrate the supply chain benefits being realized with RFID. Next we describe a specific RFID technology implementation that has been developed in collaboration with the Auto-ID Center at MIT. We then use a hypothetical Auto-ID example to demonstrate how RFID can realize the promise of “process freedoms” and supply chain visibility. The article concludes with a set N