Adoption of cross-company RFID: An empirical analysis of perceived influence factors

Although the use of RFID in the supply chain still lags behind expectations, its appeal to practitioners and researchers remains unabated. Apart from technical challenges, the profitability of an RFID deployment is a major concern for potential customers. A promising way to increase an RFID solution’s profitability is to use RFID transponders in several companies along the supply chain and share the cost and implementation effort. This paper represents a first attempt to identify the factors affecting the perceived likelihood that cross-company RFID is adopted. Our empirical results indicate that profitability is a key influence factor in this context. Related important factors are the uncertainty of costs and returns and the possible imbalance of costs and returns among the supply chain participants. The influence of organizational factors, such as power, leadership and experience, is negligible in comparison

RFID Context Data Management: The Missing Link to EPCIS-Based Supply Chain Monitoring

The potential of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for increasing supply chain efficiency has been stressed by practitioners and researchers alike. For the cross-company exchange of RFID-related data, the industry consortium EPCglobal has specified the EPC Information Services (EPCIS). According to EPCglobal, all RFID-related data recorded by an organization should be stored as EPCIS events in a dedicated database. The information that can be inferred from the EPCIS events stored in the EPCIS repositories will be sufficient to monitor the flow of goods. However, generating an EPCIS event does not only require the data that is provided by the RFID readers but also the corresponding context data (e.g. physical locations, related business process steps and related transactions). For this missing link, i.e. the association of read events and context data, we propose an architectural component called Event Capturing Application (ECA). In this paper we propose a data model for storing and exchanging EPCIS context data in an efficient and standardizable way. We also present an algorithm that can be used to assemble EPCIS events from read events and context data. The functionality of our prototypical ECA was evaluated using noFilis’ RFID middleware CrossTalk and the Fosstrack EPCIS implementation

The role of strategy in the evolution and innovation of information systems: A simulation experiment

The potential of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for increasing supply chain efficiency has been repeatedly stressed by practitioners and researchers alike. The cross-company usage of RFID applications can only work if the collaborating companies agree on the syntax and semantic used. EPCglobal, an international industry consortium, has specified a stack of specifications that enable a standardized identifier to be stored on the RFID tag and all object related data to be kept on the network. Such a standardized concept does not yet exist to store object related data on RFID tags. To minimize the coordination effort as well as the emerging interoperability or integration problems and, therefore, also guarantee wide-spread adoption of the data-on-tag approach, it is advisable to build on existing standards for the storage of data on RFID tags. In this paper, we recommend applying the ISO 13584 standard for parts libraries (PLIB). We conceptualize how to use ISO 13584 to store data on RFID tags and use a case study on a kitchen furniture manufacturer, which uses RFID tagged components in a cross-company application with its suppliers, to develop a scenario for the storage of data on RFID tags

Cost-Benefit Sharing in Cross-Company RFID Applications: A Case Study Approach

Although the highest potential for RFID in logistics is expected to be realized in cross-company applications, the status quo in the RFID project landscape is dominated by isolated solutions in specific fields. Reasons for this phenomenon are the high investment costs and the difficulty in assessing the benefits during the run-up phase. In network technologies such as RFID, the benefits depend on the spread of the technology in the network. A high discrepancy may result between the occurring costs and the resulting benefits for each of the network partners. This unequal distribution puts the success of the application at risk. To counter this trend, a balancing of costs and benefits should be considered. The research question of this paper is how these costs and benefits should be distributed among which participants. To develop a practical, relevant solution, we use an empirical research method based on an exploratory case study

RFID-enabled cooperation in the supply chain

Radiofrequenz-Identifikation (RFID) ermöglicht eine automatische Erfassung von verschiedenen Objekten ohne Sichtkontakt und verspricht durch diese Eigenschaften eine maßgebliche Verbesserung der Effizienz in Wertschöpfungsketten. Die Verbreitung der RFID-Technologie hat in den letzten Jahren verstärkt zugenommen. Doch obwohl das größte Potenzial von RFID in unternehmensübergreifenden Anwendungen gesehen wird, konzentriert sich der heutige Einsatz meist auf innerbetriebliche Anwendungen oder Pilotprojekte. Als Gründe für dieses Phänomen werden hohe Investitions- und Betriebskosten sowie eine fehlende Standardisierung angeführt. Während unternehmensübergreifende Anwendungen die Notwendigkeit an Standards noch vergrößern, liegt in ihnen eine Chance zur Überwindung des Kostenproblems. Die Nutzung einer kollaborativen RFID-Anwendung und die Wiederverwendung eines RFID-Transponders auf verschiedenen Stufen der Wertschöpfungskette eröffnet die Möglichkeit, die Kosten für jeden einzelnen Teilnehmer durch eine Kostenaufteilung zwischen allen anderen zu reduzieren. Aus diesem Grund wird ein Modell zur Kosten-Nutzen-Aufteilung entwickelt, welches eine Kategorisierung von Kompensationsformen sowie zeitliche Abhängigkeiten in dem Lebenszyklus der Anwendung umfasst. Neben diesen organisatorischen Dimensionen bilden technische Dimensionen einen weiteren Schwerpunkt der Arbeit, da fehlende Standardisierung nach wie vor als ein Hindernis für eine größere Verbreitung betrachtet wird. Die vorliegende Arbeit löst diesbezüglich drei Probleme: (1) Die Generierung von RFID-Ereignissen benötigt nicht nur die Daten von RFID-Lesegeräten, sondern zusätzliche Kontextdaten; (2) das EPCglobal-Netzwerk stellt die technische Grundlage für das Internet der Dinge, aber beschreibt nicht die Anwendungen, die auf dessen Basis realisiert werden können; (3) und es besteht bislang kein standardisierter Ansatz um neben dem EPC weitere Daten auf dem RFID-Transponder zu speichern.Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which allows for the simultaneous identification of several objects without line of sight or human interaction, promises to significantly improve supply chain efficiency. The attention researchers and practitioners are giving it, as well as the spread of RFID technology, has increased substantially in the last few years. Although the highest potential to take advantage of this spread is expected to be realized in cross-company applications, the status quo in the RFID project landscape is dominated by local solutions within companies or pilot projects. Reasons for this phenomenon include high investment and operational costs as well as missing standards. While cross-company applications exacerbate the need for standards, they make it possible to overcome the cost problems. In the course of using a collaborative RFID application, it is possible to reduce the costs for the individual player by distributing them between a larger number of participants and repeatedly using the same tag across multiple supply chain steps. For this reason, a model for cost-benefit sharing – including different categories of compensation as well as temporal dependencies during the life cycle of an application – is developed. Apart from these organizational dimensions of cross-company RFID applications, the technical dimension has to be investigated because missing technical standards are still an obstacle for the wider adoption of RFID. Three remaining problems are solved in this thesis: (1) generating RFID events does not only require the data that is provided by the RFID readers, but also corresponding context data; (2) the EPCglobal network provides the technical basis for the Internet of Things, but not the applications that might profit from using this architecture; and (3) there is no standardized approach for storing user generated content besides the EPC on the RFID tags

Storing data on RFID tags: A standards-based approach

The potential of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for increasing supply chain efficiency has been repeatedly stressed by practitioners and researchers alike. The cross-company usage of RFID applications can only work if the collaborating companies agree on the syntax and semantic used. EPCglobal, an international industry consortium, has specified a stack of specifications that enable a standardized identifier to be stored on the RFID tag and all object related data to be kept on the network. Such a standardized concept does not yet exist to store object related data on RFID tags. To minimize the coordination effort as well as the emerging interoperability or integration problems and, therefore, also guarantee wide-spread adoption of the data-on-tag approach, it is advisable to build on existing standards for the storage of data on RFID tags. In this paper, we recommend applying the ISO 13584 standard for parts libraries (PLIB). We conceptualize how to use ISO 13584 to store data on RFID tags and use a case study on a kitchen furniture manufacturer, which uses RFID tagged components in a cross-company application with its suppliers, to develop a scenario for the storage of data on RFID tags

Ontologizing B2B Message Specifications: Experiences from Adopting the Plib Ontology For . . .

Data about products and services is of paramount importance in most inter-organizational business processes. For business-to-business (B2B) scenarios, a great number of XML-based message specifications are available, which cover various processes and types of transactions. These specifications support the respective data exchange tasks by providing a common representation for products and services in the form of syntactical conventions with some light-weight formal semantics. However, an analysis of the underlying models shows that technical product data and commercial product data are being represented in a fundamentally different manner. In particular show the commercial models both a higher syntactical complexity and more semantic heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose to align the representation of technical and commercial views on product data in message specifications. Our approach is based on the PLIB ontology, which was originally described in ISO 13584. We have evaluated our proposal by applying it to an industrial message specification for electronic catalogs, and can show that the novel approach reduces representational mismatches in B2B processes and simplifies systems integration in such scenarios