26-04-06 19:16
Age: 4 yrs

BY: FLEISCH, ELGAR; RINGBECK, JÜRGEN; STROH, STEFAN; PLENGE, CHRISTIAN; DITTMANN, LARS; STRASSNER, MARTIN

As a consequence of strong competitive pressure logistics service providers (LSPs) are looking for ways to increase their value proposition. They increasingly aim to manage the whole customer’s supply chain. To achieve competitive advantage many LSPs have the ambition to offer attractive value added services, while for the majority of traditional LSPs achieving and maintaining operational efficiency is still at least equally important. In this context RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) provides benefits in two ways. On the one hand it supports the coordination of the physical flow of goods and related value added information services like tracking&tracing, condition monitoring, supply chain event management, or security related services. On the other hand it improves operational efficiency for traditional logistics processes like transportation control and asset management. The potentials of RFID are more and more discovered by customer industries, particularly retail, clothing, automotive, electronics, and pharmaceuticals which push the LSPs to look at RFID. This report analyzes the opportunities of RFID for different logistics service providers and proposes recommendations on how they can deal with the adoption, taking into account that there are chal¬lenges and risks like lack of standards, integration with existing IT systems and vague business case. The results that are presented in this report are based on a survey that was carried out jointly by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Auto-ID Lab at University of St. Gallen between November 2003 and January 2004.

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