Information Information

I feel bombarded with all this new information about marketing and PR. As it is, I spend many hours a week reading and learning about new technologies that are related to bar-coding.
Today I had an interesting call from a University that want to implement an RFID solution. RFID sounds like such a cool technology - and it is. Only that it is still not practical for most companies. The problem with RFID is the cost of the tags. The printers and scanners have come down a lot in price, but not the tags. There are also very little options when it comes to sizes. There are only few standard sizes. Huge companies do not need to worry about that, because they can afford to order the sizes they need. Small and even medium size businesses could not afford to have special size orders. I did my best to explain all of this to the customer. I think that people are under the wrong impression that RFID is here to replace barcode. It is not.
RFID is a different technology that has specific uses. We had a customer, about a year ago that ordered an RFID printer, 1 roll of tags and no RFID scanner. I asked if he already had a scanner. The answer was that he did not want to spend his money on a scanner yet. I asked if he was going to ship his goods to someone else who required him to put the RFID tags on.
The answer was no. Someone in his company just thought that RFID was cool technology and did not understand that it did not replace barcodes. Since he did not want any more input from us, we sold him the RFID printer. Few months later I met someone from that company. He told me that the RFID printer is sitting in unused in the IT manager's office.
I think that one of the most important things we do here is talk to our customers to find out what their real needs are. I believe that over the past several years we probably saved companies thousands of dollars.