As of this summer, Wal-Mart claims it has reaped many benefits in pilot stores tracking RFID tags with electronic product code (EPC) data. According to Wal-Mart, manually placed orders have declined 10 percent, reducing excess inventory and unnecessary replenishment orders from suppliers. Wal-Mart claims that the new system has ensured that suppliers’ promotional displays are delivered on time and that products are ready for sale when promotions begin, and Wal-Mart workers have been able to move product from back rooms onto store shelves three times faster than before.

For Wal-Mart’s suppliers, metrics like these have opened a window on the supply chain future. But many suppliers have, in fact, done little more with RFID than slap the tags on their cases and pallets, receiving little or no useful data in return. Over the past two years, a number of suppliers have tried to minimize the cost of complying with Wal-Mart’s demands by investing as little as possible in RFID, pointing to uncertainties around standards, readers and tags, says John Fontanella, former senior VP of retail and edge research at Aberdeen Group. And those suppliers that are able to pull the EPC data feeds (which often contain information on case and pallet movements) from Wal-Mart’s Retail Link EDI exchange haven’t yet devised a way to connect that information to their back-end systems.

To fix that disconnect requires money that, so far, has not been earned through the deployment of the technology. Add to that a dearth of RFID expertise (according to a recent Computing Technology Industry Association survey of high-tech companies, 75 percent said the RFID technology talent pool is insufficient to their needs) and it’s not surprising that in a 2006 Forrester Research survey of retailers and manufacturers just 24 percent said they have identified RFID’s business value. Michael Liard, director of RFID and contactless at ABI Research, sums up the typical supplier complaint this way: "We’ve complied, but now what? We’ve got all this data, but we don’t know what to do with it."