So I have spent the last couple of days preparing for a media interview this morning on RFID usage in automotive.  Now I don’t claim to be the world expert on RFID but from the various articles and websites that I have seen over the past 48 hours it is clear to me that there are significant benefits for automotive companies to adopt RFID technology.  Apologies, RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification and it is essentially deployed via small tags that are fixed to components or completed products.

If I were a manufacturer of a high end luxury car, or expensive aftermarket parts I would be very keen to understand where my car or parts were in the supply chain.   Having visibility of parts movements etc is critical to improving the efficiency of a supply chain and yet the adoption of RFID technology still seems to be at a relatively low level in the automotive sector, well from what I have seen so far anyway.

There seem to be a few issues, firstly the cost associated with implementing the RFID tags on the components / products and more importantly who actually picks up the cost of fitting the tags.  Then there is the small matter of establishing a global network of RFID readers at all ports, warehouses and logistics distribution centres.  Finally there is the importance of data quality, how can you be sure that the RFID tag attached to a container is actually carrying the parts listed on the Tag?. Encoding the tags is a largely manual process and when you introduce a human element to any process there is always the chance of a problem or error being introduced to the supply chain process.

There seems to be a lack of global standards to clearly define the quality of the product information that goes onto the tags or rather that the information is correctly encoded onto the tags. I guess like everything else this will be resolved one day but for the moment successful visibility of a supply chain using RFID technology is reserved for the larger automotive companies.

Over the last couple of days I found that Jaguar, in partnership with Unipart Logistics in the UK,  have successfully setup a real time aftermarket parts tracking system from their factory in the UK to distribution centres in New York and Oakland, California in the U.S.  This works through a network of RFID readers setup at specific ports that Jaguar use to ship their parts out of the UK and into the U.S . This has to be the holy grail of real time parts tracking and this has only been set up within the last year.  So why has it taken so long to get this far?

The automotive sector has always been widely regarded as leading the way with implementing any form of technology, lets hope that the RFID  system implemented at Jaguar can be deployed on a more wider basis so that more companies can benefit from having access to more accurate, real time supply chain information.