RFID: What's in it for the Forecaster?

RFID: WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE FORECASTER? By Larry Lapide (This is an ongoing column in The Journal, which is intended to give a brief view on a potential topic of interest to practitioners of business forecasting. Suggestions on topics that you would like to see covered should be sent via email to llapide@mit.edu Ed) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) seems to be in air these days! As an avid consumer and reader of supply chain management information, I get a lot of it pushed to me via the Internet, as well as from trade publications. The hottest topic is RFID as the next big thing in technology – not as big, but similar to the Internet frenzy of several years ago. Thousands of articles mention it every year. Just this past Spring semester at MIT, we had several students that researched and wrote Master’s theses on various aspects of the use of RFID tags in supply chain management and logistics. The idea for this column stems from one of these theses, written by Qiang Rose Mei, that discusses the potential impact of RFID technology use on demand planning and customer fulfillment. It started me wondering, what’s really in it for demand forecasters? This was not really ...