Why Should a Plant Engineer Care About RFID?
Some of the major retailers are suggesting that vendors adopt ultra-high frequency RFID in their own plants to provide traceability in the event of consumer product liability problems. This will require a major financial investment for product manufacturers that will affect plant engineers, and potentially their budgets. It has also raised concerns about privacy, such as how much information companies are going to be willing to share with customers. On a broader level, RFID has major implications for both consumers and companies, since conceivably someone could use the technology for research and marketing purposes by scanning homes or businesses to find out who was using what products. For the time being, most retailers intend only to use RFID technology at the warehouse level for stocking and quality control purposes. Once the technology has been widely adopted, however, there is potential for RFID to become a major social issue. A third challenge, and one that may be most problemati
