Harley Davidson produces expensive and powerful motor bikes which are sold throughout the world. Company is very successful and has a good profit. Yet back in 80-th Harley Davidson faced difficulties and was at the brink bankruptcy. In order to survive Harley Davidson decided to change chain of supplies. The first step was to reduce number of suppliers from 4000 to 350. Then Harley Davidson started to work on improving on the chain and trying to decrease expenses of supply’s chain. In 2000 Harley Davidson decided to improve infrastructure of information technologies. It started to use internet technology and asked its suppliers to use EDI for the information exchange. Harley Davidson created the web portal which calls Harley Davidson Sypply Net. Using this portal suppliers can track needed information about placed orders, transactions, forecast etc. The key tools of the portal and EDI are the scanners and barcode. Most of the spare parts and all consignments had barcode. Nowadays the technology is changing and more and more popular become RFID system which came to replace barcode. I think the Harley Davidson can start using RFID as it can give many advantages to company. First of all it will allow Harley Davidson to track inventory much faster as the tag doesn’t require line of sight and information can be read from the far distance which can’t be done with the barcode. There is no need to open each box and present the individual item because tags within a carton packed in a box stored on a pallet may be read. RFID can also store much more data than a bar code. Digital data is stored on the tag and provides for a significant capability to encode.
The information on the barcode is limited because the additional information beyond basic parameters makes the size of the bar code too large. RFID tags may be written to and offer on board memory to retain information. This feature may be used to store a product information. Updates may be made within a second and automatically without human intervention. Once a Bar Code is printed it remains frozen. RFID tags are also reusable which over time will reduce the initial higher cost of tags.
So RFID has some clear advantages comparing with the barcodes mainly because it doesn’t require human intervention and more information can be loaded on to an RFID tag. Also, readability of barcodes can be impaired by dirt, moisture, abrasion or packaging contours. RFID tags are not affected by these conditions. The tag can be read if passed near a reader, even if it is covered by the object or not visible. The tag can be read inside a case, carton, box or other container, and unlike barcodes, RFID tags can be read hundreds at a time. Bar codes can only be read one at a time using current devices.
But from other side RFID is more expensive than the barcode and this is its disadvantage.