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Wal-Mart Pushing Suppliers For RFID
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."
So in other words, Sams Club is going to try to give themselves a $2 discount? I think I tried that with my cell phone bill because the service wasn't as good as I wanted. It didn't work out very well. Imagine you were, well you, and you were standing under King Kong's foot. If he steps on you, the obvious happens. Kong demands "a $2 discount" from you, even though you are his banana supplier.
The question of the day is, does Kong get his bananas for $2 less? For extra credit, can you explain why reverse would not be true, if you attempted to demand a $2 on Kong's security services he's providing you?
~Rebecca
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.
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.
Let me act as a karma whore (not that I care about virtual karma). Last May Walmart was announcing their embrace of the RFID tech, underlining the "green" component of this tech. Then,
Other RFID stories that I find pertinent: a successful implementation of RFID tags at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Washington Navy Yard. Don't forget we discussed over
Animoog.org
Imagine you run a monster distribution center. You order from a zillion vendors and pallets of merchandise appear. Some pallets have a nice list attached to them describing what is in them so you can route them to the store without unpacking them. Others just show up with a pile of boxes and you have to, at least partially, unpack and re-wrap them to confirm the contents.
1. Your next version of your terms and conditions require a packing list.
Then, you find that most of the lists have the PO number on them and list the items by part number, but a few just say something like "Here's 10 cases of green shirts." Most have the packing list printed on a label on the side of the wrapped pallet. Some have it inaccessible from the outside.
2. Your next revision of your terms and conditions require the list to be on the outside and dictate the format.
After a few rounds, you realize that these lists are very expensive to produce and to read and all of your suppliers have (or should have) computers anyway, so you have them electronically send you the packing list and specify a shipment number. That number goes on a bar-code label at a specific place on the shipment. On your receiving dock, you have someone dance around each pallet to scan it and then it disappears into your warehouse.
3. Your next Ts and Cs require the bar-code
You find that the bar-code requires stopping the flow of items in all sorts of places. You invest in RFID readers for your whole distribution line. You tag all the incoming shipments as they arrive, and you find that it works.
4. Your next Ts and Cs require RFID labels.
A grace period comes and goes. Tagged shipments fly right through your distribution center smoothly, but you have some suppliers who still don't comply with your agreements with them and you have to stop each of those shipments on your dock and slap an RFID label on them yourself. The industry gets to the point where labels with tags are down to 40 cents in tiny quantities and the equipment to program them is down to under a thousand. There are also companies that will sell tags preprogrammed for a dollar or two. Still, some of your suppliers who were eager to sell to you and signed the Ts and Cs the day they took the order, fail to follow through.
5. You start to either refuse to accept shipments that don't comply with the contract or you charge a fee to fix the sloppy shipments.
Now, a legitimate issue is where the power in the relationship is. WM is well known for holding all the power and that really can be viewed as being all about price and accepting the Ts and Cs in the first place. That's an issue that comes up anytime they meet with a supplier. If your Verizon service stinks, you cannot do anything about it because, when you "negotiated" your contract, you could either sign THEIR terms or you could go to one of a tiny number of serious competitors who seem to have conspired to have equally onerous terms. (This is exactly why legislators keep looking at things like "customer bill of rights" legislation... the individual customer doesn't have the ability to choose a better contract).