RFID Requires Different ERP Systems

Filed in archive Software Applications on August 30, 2004

As more data becomes available through RFID, the nature of ERP systems will have to change.

A paper by Professors Edmund W. Schuster and David L. Brock of MIT, offers a future prediction about how enterprise resource planning systems will need to evolve to deal with all the data collected through RFID:

...[C]omputer science researchers have conceptualized a new type of Information Technology infrastructure that meets the challenge of real time information and unique identification. This type of infrastructure aims to link physical objects to a network, like the Internet, with RFID technology. There is no question that this new infrastructure will radically change the nature of ERP systems with the result being an order of magnitude increase in productivity. Traditional forms of delivering information technology, such as dedicated software packages that require strict adherence to predetermine ways of planning, will yield to repositories of "software agents" such as planning and scheduling models that will be combined as required to meet the needs of existing organizational processes. This will result in a truly intelligent infrastructure that will allow great flexibility in collecting data through RFID technology and the matching of relevant models to the data at hand.

Such a system is only possible through development of open standards and protocols for collection, sharing and matching data to models. Without a system based on open standards, interoperability will not be possible and the economics of building suitable interfaces will overwhelm the economic value of the new infrastructure.