John Curtin of MISRC Member Firm Hexaware Keynotes Invited Panel on Emerging Managerial Issues in RFID

On Sunday, October 21 at the INFORMS Conference on IS and Technology in Denver, Colorado, John Curtin, long-time Unisys friend of the MISRC, and now a senior manager at Hexaware responsible for global marketing and relationship development, was the keynote speaker in an invited panel session on "Research Directions for RFID."

John initiated the discussion with an overview of the technologies associated with radio frequency identification (RFID), pointing out to the audience the range of issues that remain to be resolved before the technology's performance can match the business press hype. John also spoke about current forecasts of RFID tag costs for both passive and active tags, as well as the issues associated with developing widely- accepted standards to supportive effective interoperability and geographical differences in the use of the RF spectrum.

He also discussed a number of industry mini-cases that suggest the high potential value of RFID technology in use. The most interesting example involved the story of a large manufacturing firm in India with 15,000 shift-work manufacturing employees that uses RFID tags to improve workforce management. The firm puts RFID tags on employee badges to help identify workforce substitution needs in real-time, when employees don't come to work. The mechanism the firm uses is to put RFID readers in buses that move the shift employees from the main gate of the factory complex to their respective manufacturing activities. This permits plant managers to identify how to make workforce adjustments to ensure that production disruptions don't occur due to absentee workers.

Joining John for the invited panel were MISRC Director, Rob Kauffman, and Assistant Professor, Fred Riggins, who recently initiated the MISRC's new RFID Research Project. Fred spoke presented the MISRC's new evaluative framework that helps to identify the research issues and directions associated with RFID. Rob spoke about applications of RFID for other kinds of real-time decision making, and pointed out the potential difficulties associated with organizations' ability to realize the business value of RFID in a variety of real-time and non-real-time business process settings.