You likely know that RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification. But with all of the uncertainty about the technology, the acronym could be posed as a question:

Is it Ready For Immediate Deployment?

RFID mandates and competition are driving companies to tag cases, pallets and other assets. Though these market forces help drive faster RFID adoption, they also add unnecessary confusion to a straightforward technology. The marketplace noise makes it difficult to determine which RFID applications really make sense.

Companies want to do something with the technology, but for many, it seems too expensive and too risky. They want to know what problems RFID will solve and the business processes it can improve, not to mention where and when to start and how best to pay for it.

But RFID is worth investigating. The technology can improve your existing business processes that are handled by bar code or manual input, and provide a database of valuable information.

For those companies with high-value mobile assets, like the containers used to carry raw materials and finished goods through the supply chain, the right approach to implementing RFID is through outsourcing container management to a mobile asset-management solution provider.

Like all mobile assets, though, containers are difficult to track and manage, prone to loss (1-15 percent per year for most companies), costly to buy and maintain, not optimized within the supply chain, and subject to numerous government/customer regulations due to their contents.

An RFID-enabled mobile asset-management solution addresses these problems by various methods, including asset management (the engineering, acquisition and maintenance of asset fleets) and logistics (the design and management of warehousing, transportation and reverse logistics.)

RFID's supply chain technology manages mobile assets with two key elements:

• Data capture solutions that automatically capture important location and conditional information and provide that information in near real-time.
• Software with the intelligence to answer questions like: "Where are my assets?" "What maintenance do my assets require and when?" "What contents have my assets carried in the last six months?" "Where am I losing assets?"

In addition, the RFID's mobile asset management solution provider will package the cost of assets, services and solutions into a per-use fee, enabling you to deploy best-of-breed technology and supply chain solutions while avoiding significant up-front license fees and implementation costs.

A mobile asset-management solution provider can also track assets accurately throughout the supply chain to help optimize inventory. The provider may purchase the assets from you, freeing valuable capital that can then be used for more strategic purposes. The provider's transportation-services buying power can result in lower transportation costs.

Since the provider meets your container requirements on demand, it lowers warehousing costs by removing the burden of empty container storage, handling and repair and freeing up valuable storage space and labor. Proper tracking technology can also improve loss prevention.

So who should consider taking this step? Any company with a fleet of high-value containers that wants improved supply-chain management and a low-risk and cost-effective way to adopt RFID.