Smaller companies are bracing themselves for the edict to adopt radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging. Based on past experience of supply chain mandates, the expectation is that when a large customer announces plans to apply RFID, the costs, and much of the grief, will be passed onto suppliers.

At first glance RFID may not seem much of an advance over barcodes: information is encoded on tags, which are attached to products and scanned by readers. The significant differences are that once activated to transmit radio signals, RFID tags can be read at a distance, no line of sight is required and multiple tags can be read at the same time.