It seems that WalMart has backed off from its original tight plan on RFID because Carolyn Walton, VP of Information Technology for WalMart officially announced a dramatic change in the company´s strategy earlier this month. She said in the EPC Global conference on Oct. 5 that WalMart, from now on, is going to focus only on three lines of initiatives in respect to RFID:




1) Pallet tagging for a Sam's Club DC to test RFID-based putaway

2) Tagging of just products and dis-plays on promotion for the week, testing new "hot spot" reader networks in store to improve pro-motional execution

3) Tagging an entire category, start-ing with a test of air fresheners, to see if sales can be lifted through improved in-stocks.

Observers of the industry such as SC Digest believe that WalMart has come to an understanding that the more evolutionary approach of competitors like Tesco is more effective and so has adopted a similar strategy in contradiction to its original plan to enforce its suppliers to use RFID on the case level.

In my point of view, there is a business case for the current initiative compared to the earlier projects and specially if implemented well, WalMart will benefit a lot. What do you think?