Measuring Readiness for RFID Adoption: Reflection from Iranian Supply Chain Companies

Abstract

In order to benefit from RFID adoption, entire RFID infrastructure must first be established and supply chain companies should conduct considerable up-front analyses to assess their readiness. The purpose of this study is to survey the readiness of supply chain companies in Iran for RFID adoption. Therefore, facilities, conditions and necessary readiness for the successful adoption of RFID systems in Iranian grocery supply chain companies have been investigated. The study involved survey data from 89 Iranian grocery supply chain companies. The findings reveals that grocery supply chain companies in Iran are overall not ready for RFID adoption and to adopt these systems successfully; in the first step, technological, organizational, and environmental problems and challenges of supply chain companies must be wiped out. This subject, besides Iranian grocery supply chain companies, could be also extended to other supply chain companies in Iran. Key words: Radio frequency identification, Readiness for RFID adoption, Grocery supply chain. INTRODUCTION Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a small tag containing an integrated circuit chip and an antenna, and has the ability to respond to radio waves transmitted from the RFID reader in order to send, process, and store information. The RFID system consists of three basic components: a tag, a reader, and back office data pro-cessing equipment. The tag contains unique identification information of the item to which it is attached; the reader emits and receives radio waves to read the information stored in the tag, and the data-processing equipment processes all the collected data (Wu et al., 2006; Thornton, 2006; Sandip, 2005). At the present state of technology, simultaneous communication at a rate of 1,000 tags per second is possible, with an accuracy that exceeds 98% (Hunt et al., 2007). RFID technology is considered as ‘‘the next big thing’’ in management (Wyld, 2006, Ashon and Ilyas, 2008) and was introduced as one of the top ten technology in the world in 2004 and 2005 (Janz et al., 2005). In recent