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Wal-Mart Pushing Suppliers For RFID

Posted by Soulskill on from the their-way-or-the-highway dept.

Weather Storm brings us an InformationWeek article about Wal-Mart's push for suppliers to RFID tag their product shipments. Wal-Mart seems to have lost patience in waiting for its suppliers to adopt the inventory tracking initiative. From InformationWeek: "The retailer says that beginning Jan. 30, it will charge suppliers a $2 fee for each pallet they ship to its Sam's Club distribution center in Texas that doesn't have an RFID tag. The charge is to cover Sam's Club's cost to affix tags on each pallet, says a Wal-Mart spokesman. The retailer hasn't taken such a strong-arm approach yet with the more than 15,000 suppliers that still haven't complied with its request to tag pallets and cases headed for its Wal-Mart stores. Instead, it seems focused on turning its 700-store Sam's Club warehouse-outlet division into an example of RFID supply chain technology in action, down to requiring item-level RFID in 22 distribution centers by 2010."

2 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't this a good use for RFID? by morbiuswilters · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not being implanted in anyone, it's not being used to track personal information, it's just for inventory control. Maybe I'm missing something here, but this seems like the kind of application we should be supporting. Complaining about it seems almost as bad as the people who fought against barcodes because they contain the "mark of the Beast".

    --
    I have come here to chew memory and kick ass... and malloc() is returning a null pointer.
  2. Re:Can you charge a supplier $2? by homer_s · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's say a warehouse employee makes $18/hr. (They make less, I'm sure, but it makes the math easy.) $.20 goes to the cost of the tag, and $1.80 goes to the cost of putting the tag on. This means that it takes 6 minutes (1/10th of an hour) to tag a pallet? If it took 3 minutes, I'd be very surprised. That employee should be able to tag 1 pallet per minute, easily. Remember, he doesn't have to actually COUNT the product, since even the tagged ones still need to be counted. He just needs to read the manifest and enter it into the computer, and slap the RFID tag on.

    Cost of employee to tag at 1 per min= $0.30
    Cost of labour training=0
    Cost of payroll tax, HR management=0
    Cost of chip = $0.20
    Cost of ordering the chips = 0
    Cost of receiving the chips = 0
    Cost of storage of the chips = 0
    Cost of restocking the chips = 0
    Cost of quality control = 0
    Cost of equipment to affix the chip=0
    Cost of insurance=0
    Cost of billing the suppliers and paperwork involved =0
    Interest on capital employed for the above=0

    Yep, your math works out. You should start your own business instead of posting here on slashdot.