Data control: the role of data integration platforms in radio tagging

Having overcome an initial phase of uncertainty in the market, due to the lack of standards, certain reasonable doubts about the privacy of data and the high cost of tags, the RFID technology, RFID, advances in areas such as distribution and logistics.

In the field of logistics and supply chains, RFID technology is particularly attractive for its potential to reduce operating costs and improve efficiency in the supply chain, inventory, logistics and customer facing retailers. Thus, large establishments already require their suppliers to tag with RFID, as technology allows, for example, to detect low levels of stocks, reduce the volume of products of low turnover, eliminate inventory errors (because its accuracy is about 100%) and ensure high availability of the products demanded.
The avalanche of data
All these benefits at the same time involve certain dangers, there are few companies that are preparing adequately to the problems posed by the huge volume of data that technology generates in real time. The articles prepared for Radio Frequency Identification create up to 100 times more information than barcode technology traditional, unlike the relative simplicity of these codes, RFID uses electromagnetic technology with more memory, integrated circuits and the capacity to store information well more detail.
The most advanced RFID sensors are capable of capturing environmental conditions such as temperature, light and moisture. This, which in principle is as remarkable as positive, can become a nightmare for anyone who has to deal with millions of bytes of information, and to correctly handle RFID data is essential to convert it into useful information as a basis for decision making in real time.
However, current technology offers an effective solution to the avalanche RFID: platforms for data integration (DI) and Business Intelligence, with its ability to capture, integration and analysis of information, so platforms integration incorporate functionality that enables today face the challenge RFID for data capture and supply of on-line to any network application, to extract relevant data via interfaces that allow to know what information has been moved, where, when and how, and to capture and transmit only the updated data.
The capture of data alone is therefore insufficient. We need a comprehensive solution to capture, integrate and enrich the data in batches or in real time and delivered to the company. A data integration platform will allow both use the RFID technology and support standards, management of real-time events, metadata analysis, data lineage, data enrichment, profiling and security. It also uses the built-in data cleansing to consolidate items from multiple vendors and locations distributed value chains.
Furthermore, DI platforms are capable of reading hundreds of data formats and transform the chosen format, as the integration engine generates a new data set that meets the needs of retail, alerting on the predefined events or pumping data to data warehouses, where they are analyzed with BI tools.
They also enrich integration platforms, real-time RFID data with contextual information such as price data, geographic and expiration. The product data captured at the time, place and pace of a supply chain may well be analyzed in dimensions that have not been practical before, and the benefits of controlling a product over the cause of RFID technology will prevail in the coming years as one of the most useful tools for maximizing the value of information.

Author:

Brian Gentile, CEO for Iberia Computing Corporation