Cash-strapped airlines, however, think a lot about serving carts (called trolleys within the industry), which can cost as much as $1,000 each. "We’ve heard horrific stories of airlines losing up to 1,500 of these things in three months," says Tony Naylor, vice president of in-flight solutions for eLSG.SkyChefs, a technology provider for the airline catering industry based in Irving, Texas.

To keep tabs on their vanishing trolleys, airlines and their outsourcing partners, like eLSG.SkyChefs, have tried a variety of different tracking approaches, ranging from bar-code scanning to manually counting inventory. Each technique, however, required at least some degree of human intervention?a significant weakness in a system that aims to keep humans from swiping trolleys.

Like a growing number of businesses that need to track physical assets, eLSG.SkyChefs turned to radio frequency identification (RFID), a data collection technology that uses electronic tags to store identification data and a remote reader to capture information. RFID tags come in many shapes and sizes, ranging from tiny animal tracking tags inserted beneath a critter’s skin to 5-by-4-by-2-inch placards slapped on shipping containers, trucks and railway cars.

Naylor says his company was attracted to RFID because of the technology’s hands-off nature. "Every time you’ve got human intervention, things don’t always go according to plan," he says. Unlike bar codes, the main competition, RFID doesn’t require time-consuming hand scanning or even sequential automatic scanning (readers can capture data at gulps of up to 96 tags per second). RFID information is also readable regardless of the asset’s position while a bar code can be blocked by other objects.

For eLSG.SkyChefs, finding the right RFID technology wasn’t easy. The RFID market?systems, software, accessories and services?encompasses more than two dozen vendors, including Lockwood Technology, RF Code and Texas Instruments. "It really was a little bit of a minefield as we went through this because there were so many conflicting stories and opinions," says Naylor. The company ultimately settled on Scanpak, a Dorval, Quebec-based company that offers Galley Equipment Tracking System (GETS), an RFID application targeted specifically at trolley management.

The Case for RFID

RFID has existed for at least a decade, yet the technology has never lived up to its proponents’ expectations. "It’s always something that’s ’the next big thing,’" says Jeff Woods, a senior analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. Like others who follow the industry, Woods believes that RFID’s acceptance has been hampered by a number of factors, including high costs, a lack of standards and global radio frequency differences that sometimes prevent businesses from shipping RFID-tagged objects between countries.