Dave Bailey

Here’s something that may surprise you. The history of RFID use in the UK dates back to the Second World War. On New Year’s Day 1940 the RAF’s Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system was rolled out in an attempt to prevent ground controllers from mistakenly scrambling and vectoring a squadron of fighters to intercept friendly aircraft. The RAF’s ground radar triggered a transponder fitted to British aircraft to broadcast a radio signal that basically said: “I’m friendly, please don’t shoot me down.”

Since then, however, RFID’s history has been a tale of one false start after another. So what is holding back companies such as Tesco from deploying the technology? The supermarket giant recently announced that it is extending its RFID pilot into 2009, and most other retailers are taking a similarly cautious approach.

Part of the problem is that the business case for rolling out RFID is far from conclusive. Holloway Consulting’s Simon Holloway, an RFID expert who has been seconded to Toshiba’s new RFID@Toshiba consulting and implementation business, says companies are increasingly wary of the return on investment (ROI) pitch because they have been bitten by these calculations before.

That said, there are many firms in the UK that have been sufficiently swayed by ROI calculations to have moved on to the next stage: a pilot project. RFID@Toshiba aims to guide organisations through this stage of the process and on to implementation.

It is during the pilot phase that all the niggly technical problems get ironed out, and with RFID being a wireless technology, there’s no shortage of those. Chief among them is the danger of interference with other wireless technologies such as mobile operators’ base stations. Cracking this particular nut requires a detailed site survey, which can be a lengthy and complicated process. Companies that have deployed wireless networks should already have experience of this, but if they think this means they can avoid going through it all again for RFID, they’re in for a disappointment.

Anyway, back to Tesco. It’s been piloting RFID since April 2004, which is ample time to iron out the technical issues. So what’s holding it back? Maybe it’s waiting for a critical mass of its suppliers to roll out RFID. US supermarket giant Wal-Mart didn’t want to wait around for this, and so told all its 20,000 suppliers to either roll out RFID systems or start looking for another business partner. Despite its enormous size, Tesco probably thinks it hasn’t got quite enough clout to do that. Or perhaps its reluctance is down to concerns about tag failures, hardware costs, software costs, RFID-generated data overload and the potential for privacy-related lawsuits.

So, despite the RAF’s pioneering work, there is still no shortage of reasons for RFID projects to crash and burn.