A year back, when we asked a CIO of a leading retail firm, his
thoughts on using
RFID, he had just one simple answer – while the cost of the
RFID tag has been reducing
year-on-year, the overall cost from an Indian context was still
prohibitive, and did not offer a business case for mass
deployment. As one can see, RFID is the perfect example of a
brilliant technology, which has not yet found the level of success
due to its prohibitive cost of deployment.
To tackle the high cost of deploying RFID, an Indian firm,
QuantumID Technologies
(QID), has come up with an interesting innovation. The firm
offers ‘RFID-as-a-service’ wherein it offers a complete
RFID solution – the hardware, software, and the
implementation on a pay-per-transaction model.
“Instead of spending on CAPEX, retail firms can use
our model to deploy RFID. The payper- transaction model ensures
that it becomes a part of their revenue.”
- Prasanna Gogwekar, COO, QID Technologies
“Instead of spending on CAPEX, retail firms can use our
model to deploy RFID. The pay-per-transaction model ensures that it
becomes a part of their revenue,” opines Prasanna Gogwekar,
COO, QID.
To ensure scalability, QID has enabled its data storage layer
associated with its RFID ACT system (Automated Cargo tracking) on
the Microsoft Azure Platform. The cloud platform is ideal for a
closed loop supply chain process. In these scenarios, data storage
requirements can be huge when you consider that hundreds or maybe
thousands of
RFID tags are read multiple times at different points in the supply
chain.
The cloud model gives QID the ability to scale up storage needs as
business volumes grow. “The cloud is central to our business.
From a scale point of view, we can scale up by more than 30-40
times without worrying about the cost of infrastructure. Due to the
cloud, we are able to bring down the cost of providing RFID
services, and make it a viable
proposition to the Indian market,” exclaims Gogwekar.
The cloud also gives it the ability to customize the solution
according to different industry verticals. For example, in certain
industries such as textiles, transactions can be priced per meter,
while in other industries transactions can be priced per kilogram.
The RFID-as-a-service model has already been deployed for
Kingfisher Cargo, where the solution has been tested out for scale
for handling thousands of pieces of cargo.