RFID and Advanced Analytics to see wider adoption in 2020

Enterprises constantly seek to improve their businesses by gathering detailed information like their inventory levels, work-in-progress status, and their staff’s location. With the availability of timely and accurate data, enterprises will be able to gain a competitive edge. As such, enterprises will need to adopt new technological solutions to achieve this objective, and this trend is expected to continue in 2020 and beyond.

Some key trends driving this adoption are:

Move to unattended solutions – Enterprises are expecting more from data capture especially pertaining to 2D barcodes, vision-based recognition, higher levels of inventory accuracy to support omnichannel, broader RFID adoption, and analytics software, just to name a few. The common point is that they all work hand-in-hand to increase the amount of data that business solutions generate. Some of these trends, such as analytics, are focused on making the tremendous level of data more manageable and actionable. That said, the huge amount of data collected is quickly becoming too much for people to process manually. Therefore, enterprises across all verticals, in 2020 and beyond, are likely to be on the lookout for complete solutions that can collect data about their physical work environments and the assets within them as well as process it into actionable insights.

Analytics – Enhanced visibility of any business operations will only be useful if the data gathered can be churned into actionable insights within a reasonable timeframe. In fact, the sooner this can be done, the more beneficial it is to a business. Additionally, there is also increased usage of cloud-based solutions to reduce in-house IT spend to enable the leverage of analytics that can optimize workflows and reveal meaningful insights.

Increased RFID penetration - RFID adoption is increasing at a rapid rate as customers look to improve asset visibility in a near real-time manner. The adoption of UHF RAIN RFID EPC (Electronic Product Code) continues to expand, with the market growing by more than 30% in 2019 after a 15% growth in 2018.

A key driver for RFID adoption is for inventory control in the retail vertical, especially when retailers are faced with the challenge of building a truly integrated retail experience whereby the in-store, online, and in-between (store pickup) are seamlessly interconnected. The need for real-time, in-store inventory accuracy has become so essential today, and RFID is one of the technologies that has proven to deliver up to 99% accuracy. Further, as EPC adoption grows, more and more products are tagged by default - making it even easier for the next customer along the integrated retail supply chain to adopt and benefit.

Enterprises today need greater visibility in terms of their inventory levels, work-in-progress status, and their staff’s location to gain a competitive edge. An increase in data capture will lead to the collection of tremendous amounts of data that will be too much to process manually. This is why we are seeing RFID and computer vision technologies being used increasingly from the football field to the plant floor to the retail store. Enterprises need to implement complete solutions that can collect data and process it into actionable insights automatically, thereby enhancing efficiency.”

Contributed by:  Deep Agarwal, Regional Sales Director, Zebra Technologies