The modern supply chain is globalised, highly integrated and competitive, and very complex. The daily manufacturing, storage, transport and exchange of millions of products poses significant problems in terms of object confidentiality and security. Counterfeiting, smuggling, shrinkage, wastage and inefficiencies are common and costly.
To solve this, a number of initiatives for the automatic identification of products have been recently proposed. Among many, the most promising is the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, also called electronic barcodes. However, conventional RFID systems only address these problems partially, and create a number of other challenges along the supply chain:
Industrial espionage – detecting confidential products and designs
Counterfeiting – cloning or transplanting tags
Terrorism – finding sensitive objects
Theft – identifying high-value products
Consumer profiling – tracking consumers in shops
Consumer tracking – on-street tracking
Snooping – identifying private or confidential objects
Conventional RFID tags can be easily detected and read by third parties, which makes their fraudulent cloning or transplantation an easy task, and they may also expose objects to undesired detection by third parties like competitors or thieves. Moreover, the use of conventional RFID in the prevention of shoplifting is problematic because recommendations on consumer privacy dictate that these tags must be removable or easy to de-activate.
Furthermore, the continuing high-cost of silicon-based tags means that the key 5-cent tag barrier has still not been broken. Existing RFID systems also pose tremendous reliability problems, particularly when reading a high number of tags.
With our Intelligent Object Tracking System companies not only benefit from low cost of tags, but also ensure reliability and the security and privacy of themselves and their consumers from unauthorised access, cloning, theft and/or counterfeiting. The table below shows a comparison of our Intelligent Object Tracking System with conventional RFID.
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