Wal-Mart Case Study – RFID

Introduction

Technology is inevitable in every sphere of life today; it has always made things easier. Wal-Mart works on the same strategy, from the above description; we can understand how diversified Wal-Mart is and the volume of cargo it needs to handle for each of its business’s. Traditionally, it had started with computerization of individual stores with small billing machines and had then led to centralized billing for record keeping. The technology has grown by leaps and bounds and has become increasingly challenging to maintain large databases of information and maintain records. Powerful computers networked with high performance clusters maintain and store this data. This gives a picture as to how technology plays a vital role in today’s’ businesses.

Traditionally, technology has been upgraded in billing systems and for storage purposes. A new area where technology could be applied to, where many expenses could be saved was in inventory management and logistics. Wal-Mart being so huge, needed to keep track of men and material sent across different countries and had to maintain hundreds of warehouses across the world. Bar-codes have been initially identified as a suitable technology to meet the purpose.

But due to the limitations of barcodes, a new emerging technology called RFID has been identified to meet the demands. RFID is low cost Radio Frequency Identification system which requires minimum human intervention to carry out tasks ranging from billing to materials tracking and supply chain management. It is a small wireless device which can store good amount of data and can virtually be tagged to anything.

RFID is an electronic tagging technology as shown in figure 1 that allows an object, place, or person to be automatically identified at a distance without a direct line-of-sight, using an electromagnetic