What is the "Best" RFID product out there?

Working on a new article with one of our trade publications I was asked again "What do you think the Best RFID is?"

This same basic questions is always asked of my team, it does not matter if we are engaged by the Vendor to help them pick the “Best Solution” for this operation or the end-user customer, they want the “Best Solution”.

OK so now I am compelled to write another Blog entry as this is a recurring theme.

“The Best RTLS/RFID Solution” Depends on many factors:
1. The environment you are tracking in.
2. Your budget.
3. Assets you are trying to track.
4. Business need or ROI time line.
5. Your current infrastructure.
6. Business processes also play a huge roll in selecting the correct solution.

We specialize in helping customers select the correct solution for their environment keeping a very close eye on the total cost of deployment not just the cost of the tags. The Key is to balance the current business processes, software, tracking patterns, and processing to the system selected. Operating agnostically to the technology and associated with hundreds of vendors and solution suites both in hardware and software our services save both the customer and vendor thousands of $$$$ in, cost, deployment time, and frustration with our thirty plus years of Logistics, supply chain automation and RFID deployments.

Remember there is no best solution for RFID/RTLS but there is a best solution for your needs. Passive tagging, WiFi, ZigBee, Bar-Code may be the lowest cost solution upfront, but the business requirements for performance and granularity may require heavy infrastructure upgrades or employee involvement in your environment that could take years to recover if ever. Time wise a little more upfront on the RFID solution may save months of deployment time, and in some cases millions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades. Time is money in today’s competitive world and infrastructure upgrades take both time and cold hard cash.

Remember “The Best RFID/RTLS Solution” sometimes needs to be blended together for a perfect fit and that requires experience and knowledge of the complete cross section of the RFID and Lean Logistic market. It is very hard to get one solution to fit every need so pick a vendor that knows how to offer not only their solution but options when it does not fit 100%.

As a matter of fact 40% of our business is driven by customers that call us after the fact and say we spent all this money on this or that solution and it’s just not want we thought we asked for. 40% of our business is from the vendor side asking us to do the pre-sales consulting helping design and blend the correct system together for their customer. The other 20% is devoted to Business Development for companies Around the Globe, Speaking at conferences, and writing articles answering these questions from people that don’t engage us or other services like us upfront.

Chose wisely my friends and colleagues, automated location is just a few days away.

Byron