RFID vs. Bar Coding

Reference: Hozak, K. and Collier, D.A. (2008) RFID as an enabler of improved manufacturing performance, Decision Sciences 39:4, 859-881.

I always enjoy reading articles with counter-intuitive conclusions or conclusions that attempt to dispel commonly accepted truths about an issue. This one concludes that unless processes are changed, RFID fails to provide much of an operational benefit, if any, over bar coding. Attempts to improve mean flow time and the proportion of transactions that are tardy by reducing lot size, a practice enabled by RFID, could actually have the reverse affect. Very interesting! These conclusions, and several related ones, are based solely on a simulation, which may be suspect, as simplifying conditions are always assumed. Nevertheless, anyone considering RFID adoption should read this. The other caveat, and perhaps the more important one, is that the benefits to improved information and reliability are not considered. I've always thought that the information benefits of RFID outweighed all production metric benefits, so I'm not terribly disturbed by the conclusions. But for those who are considering adopting RFID for the production benefits alone, these conclusions should be kept in mind.