INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Information Technology and Information Systems for Business



Information Technology and Information Systems for Business

Introduction

The past two years have witnessed an explosion of interest in RFID and supporting technologies primarily due to their rapidly expanding use to track products through the grocery supply chain. Such applications monitor Store-Keeping Units (SKU) rather than individual product items, since item-level tagging is not yet practical due to the relatively high cost of RFID deployment and the very low profit margin of supermarket products. Yet, putting economic and other technical concerns aside, one can easily envision a situation where each item in a supermarket is tagged with an RFID label, shopping carts feature RFID readers and potentially on board computers that recognize products put in the cart, and display information and promotions retrieved wirelessly from the system back-end. In this paper we analysed the case of woman's clothing company in Hollola.

Analysis

From the case study it is observed that In retail stores and other environments, the inability to rapidly locate items is a common problem. Retailers may appear to be out of stock of a product, when in fact the product may be available in the back of the store or may have been placed on the wrong shelf. RFID (radiofrequency identification) technology has been proposed as a means to improve the ability to track inventory and to locate objects. In particular, the use of RFID-tagged objects coupled with smart shelves that include RFID readers has been proposed as a means of efficiently tracking the presence of products in a retail environment. However, the smart shelves that have been demonstrated in public trials have employed numerous expensive RFID readers adapted to read sections of a single shelf, and have required the use of expensive and bulky coaxial cable for each of the readers (Sarma S., Brock D. and Engels D., 2001).

Improved smart shelves have been proposed in which a single antenna built into the shelf can be used to read discrete sections of a shelf, but even with these improved systems numerous readers may be needed for each of the many shelves in a store, and even then objects may be placed in regions not adjacent to a smart shelf where they may effectively disappear from an RFID-based inventory tracking system. While advances in technology promise to bring the cost of RFID scanners down substantially, the cost of numerous smart ...