When I was sitting watching my beloved Indianapolis Colts lose their first round of the NFL playoffs I started losing interest and starting of thinking about how RFID will transform the world we live in.  If you think about the billions of dollars that have been spent on ERP, accounting, CRM, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and many other IT systems they all have one thing in common.  They rely on humans to input data.

Recently BlueBean completed a RFID project for GE Aviation and I was speaking with one of their Six Sigma Black Belts.  We discussed that RFID is perfectly suited for taking the human (variability) out of the process.  RFID allows for real world objects to communicate directly with those expensive IT systems with no human interaction.

Ok, lets take a Healthcare example - consider a mobile asset management system in a hospital.  The only way to track a mobile asset (i.e. IV pump, heart monitor...) in the past was for a person to manually keep track of where these assets were located.  So if maintenance was required on a certain IV pump someone would need to physically walk around the hospital until that pump was found.  It was too difficult and error prone to manually track these assets.  Now consider RFID.... every mobile asset has a active RFID tag or passive RFID Tag and would provide location information back to a centralized mobile asset management solution.

Consider hospital supplies - each item (supply) would have a RFID tag and when these items are placed on a smart shelf the backend inventory system will know inventory levels in real time with no human intervention.

As RFID equipment prices drop and the performance improves more applications will become viable.