For all those people questioning whether RFID will deliver a return on investment for manufacturers tagging cases and pallets, Mark Roberti has some encouraging news.

In his opinion column at the RFID Journal today, he describes the pleasantly surprising ROI that Gillette discovered -- in a totally unexpected way:

...Gillette discovered that at stores moving a Gillette product the manufacturer was promoting from the stockroom to the shelves before the promotion hit, average sales were 48 percent higher than at stores that did so after the promotion's start. Gillette also found that 38 percent of the stores didn't execute properly to take advantage of promotions.

This data suggests Gillette could improve its promotional sales significantly if it were to work with that partner to ensure promotional product got to shelves in a timely way. Gillette plans to pilot, and eventually deploy, a promotions management application from OAT Systems that will do just that.

Now here's the amazing part: Promotions management was not part of Gillette's original business case. It didn't discover the huge potential of managing promotions until after it had actually begun analyzing RFID data from its partners. Other manufacturers have told me similar stories. That's the nature of serendipitous ROI.

As Mark notes, you can't find out these unexpected benefits from a field trial. You actually have to start using RFID in regular use to discover these kinds of benefits.

Read the whole opinion column.