Item-level RFID tagging is almost a decade away

He said applicability and quality barriers at the manufacturing end are slowing compliance.

Speaking at this year’s Softworld supply chain conference in Birmingham, Montgomery predicted that item-level compliance would not come in until 2013, and said case-level could be as long as five years away.

One of the principle problems is the read-rate achieved by current technology.

‘Successful read rates have been reported in the 80 to 90 per cent range, a long way from the 100 per cent compliance Wal-Mart demands,’ said Montgomery in a statement. ‘Initially, products that contain liquid or metal still present a problem for successful reads.’

Montgomery pointed out that the expense of redesigning existing packaging would force suppliers to manually position tags on only the highest value goods, a practice that could seriously disrupt supply chain processes.

Montgomery cited AMR Research, which put the average cost of compliance to suppliers at up to US$23 million (£12.5 million). This is mainly because of the cost of tags, but is also caused in part by the cost of changes to existing supply chain solutions.

The need to beef up storage and analytics systems is also a factor to cope with the huge increase in raw data both suppliers and retailers will receive.