A recent article in RFID Journal states that, according to Karen Butner of IBM, “the baseline for smarter supply chains really is about RFID, sensors, and actuators“. Really?
What smarter supply chains require is visibility … near real-time visibility to be precise. You don’t need RFID chips and sensors to get that. You need processes and procedures that make sure that the status of every package is recorded every time it changes location … from the supplier warehouse to the transport truck to the dock warehouse to the container to the cargo ship to the dock to the transport truck to your warehouse … and that this information is always accessible. The status can be manually updated by a receiving clerk that scans a barcode with a handheld device or, if you are challenged when it comes to new-fangled gadgets, enters a bar-code into a dumb-terminal … which can then indicate if the bar-code is recognized and the state change is expected.
That would seem to tell me that the basis of smarter supply chains with near real-time visibility is not overhyped RFID & sensor technology, but smart people following smart processes that use smart information technology. Am I wrong?