So our operations management and one of our largest customer are interested in using RFID tags to identify and track product. The customer would use the tags in the field, but operations is wanting the RFID tags to report themselves to Epicor as product goes through various operations and then update MES labor quantities for those operations.
I have not dealt with RFID and am wondering if any others have integrated RFID with Epicor.
Thanks.
Brad
RFID is the same as barcodes. You just use different tags and readers than a barcode scanner.
Although, there are some things that you can’t do with bar-codes that you can with RFID. Barcodes are line-of-sight. You can read an RFID without seeing the tag. An RFID tag can be re-writable, that is you can store a limited amount of data on them and change that data later.
How you would integrate that into Epicor has more to do with imagination than the technology itself.
RFID are “nice to have” if the solution is cost effective for the solution. It is all a matter of what is the return on such investment?
Ìn the past we went into the analysis process of implementing RFID (before Epicor days… ) and management decided that the cost to implement was too great. (having readers on each shipping door, at production stations , buying the tags , implementation costs …etc…)
Maybe now the cost has dropped down enough to reconsider… I would be interested to hear about the outcome of your quest…
Pierre
Hold my beer! We developed a tracking system that utilizes RFID technology to identify where a tag was last seen (whether that was 2 seconds ago or several hours ago). And we are interfacing it with Epicor. We haven’t developed the automatic data collection - yet. Phase 2 for us. I think the reason why so many companies haven’t implemented an RFID solution is due to the historically exorbitant cost. Wal Mart attempted it 10 years ago when tags were $1/each. It is much more cost effective now, both hardware and tag costs. The same tags are less than $.05/each.