John K. Visich

Radio Frequency Identification Technology: Applications, Technical Challenges and Strategies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the technology behind RFID systems, identify the applications of RFID in various industries, and discuss the technical challenges of RFID implementation and the corresponding strategies to overcome those challenges.Design/methodology/approach – Comprehensive literature review and integration of the findings from literature.Findings – Technical challenges of RFID implementation include tag cost, standards, tag and reader selection, data management, systems integration and security. The corresponding solution is suggested for each challenge.Research limitations/implications – A survey type research is needed to validate the results.Practical implications – This research offers useful technical guidance for companies which plan to implement RFID and we expect it to provide the motivation for much future research in this area.Originality/value – As the infancy of RFID applications, few researches have existed to address the technical issues of RFID implementat...

Empirical evidence of RFID impacts on supply chain performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the actual benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) on supply chain performance through the empirical evidence.Design/methodology/approach – The research reviews and classifies the existing quantitative empirical evidence of RFID on supply chain performance. The evidence is classified by process (operational or managerial) and for each process by effect (automational, informational, and transformational).Findings – The empirical evidence shows that the major effects from the implementation of RFID are automational effects on operational processes followed by informational effects on managerial processes. The RFID implementation has not reached transformational level on either operational or managerial processes. RFID has an automational effect on operational processes through inventory control and efficiency improvements. An informational effect for managerial processes is observed for improved decision quality, production control and the effe...

Radio Frequency Identification: Supply Chain Impact and Implementation Challenges

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has received considerable attention from practitioners, driven by mandates from major retailers and the US Department of Defense. RFID technology promises numerous benefits in the supply chain, such as increased visibility, security and efficiency. Despite such attentions and the anticipated benefits, RFID is not well understood and many problems exist in the adoption and implementation of RFID. The purpose of this paper is to introduce RFID technology to practitioners and academicians by systematically reviewing the relevant literature, discussing how RFID systems work, their advantages, supply chain impacts, and the implementation challenges and the corresponding strategies, in a hope of providing guidance for practitioners in the implementation of RFID technology and offering a springboard for academicians to conduct future research in this area.

An Exploratory Study of RFID Implementation in the Supply Chain

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the barriers and motivations for adopting radio frequency identification (RFID), the level of RFID implementation, the processes RFID is utilized in, and issues in the deployment of RFID.Design/methodology/approach – A survey instrument was developed based on a literature review. The survey was then distributed to the members of the Association for Operations Management Rhode Island and Boston chapters. The results were then analyzed.Findings – It was found that the majority of the surveyed firms are not considering RFID implementation. Lack of a business case and lack of understanding were cited as their main concerns. For firms considering RFID implementation and firms that had implemented RFID, better inventory management, obtaining competitive advantage, and cost reduction were the three most important motivations for adopting RFID. Financial concerns and the lack of a business case were the most prevalent issues. In addition, product tracking (pal...

Radio Frequency Identification Applications in Hospital Enviroments

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

An Empirical Comparison of Improvement Heuristics for the Mixed-Model, U-Line Balancing Problem

Mixed-model assembly lines often create model imbalance due to differences in task times for the different product models. Smoothing algorithms guided by meta-heuristics that can escape local optimums can be used to reduce model imbalance. In this research, we utilise the meta-heuristics tabu search (TS), the great deluge algorithm (GDA) and record-to-record travel (RTR) to reduce three objective functions: the absolute deviation from cycle time, the maximum deviation from cycle time, and the sum of the cycle time violations. We found that the GDA was significantly superior to the RTR and TS algorithms across all problem sizes and objective functions. For the 19 task problems, RTR performed significantly better than TS for all three objective functions. On the other hand, for the 61 and 111 task problems TS performed significantly better than RTR for all three objective functions.

Operations Management Curricula: Literature Review and Analysis

Abstract A review and analysis of studies on the interface between Operations Management (OM) academicians and industry practitioners indicate the existence of a persistent gap between what is being taught and what is relevant to practitioners in their daily jobs. The majority of practitioner studies have been directed at upper management levels, yet academia typically educates students for entry level or management trainee (undergraduate) and midmanagement (MBA) positions. A recurring finding was that academicians prefer to teach quantitative techniques while practitioners favor quantitative concepts. The OM curricula literature shows some disagreements between academicians concerning subject matter, and a wide variety of teaching opinions. This paper provides an extensive analytical review of OM curricula literature along with their respective authors’ conclusions. From this analysis we suggest a customer-focused business plan to close the gap between industry and academia. This plan can be modified to account for faculty teaching and research interests, local industry requirements and institution specific factors such as class sizes and resources.