More foodie thoughts....

In my weekly trawl of the interesting RDID web sites, I picked up on a release from BearingPoint Inc, which I thought harked back nicely to the foodie theme that I've been following for the last few entries.

It also highlighted to me one of the weaknesses that seem to turn up in most RFID case studies and press releases and made me think about what we are doing with ours.

BearingPoint helped the Chinese Food Safety Administration Office to deliver an RFID based end-to-end food tracking system for the Beijing Olympics. (More details here)

Now, it seems to me that this sort of system can be viewed as a sort of insurance policy. What to me is interesting about this system is not the number of trucks equipped with sensors (206) or the number of food deliveries monitored (3800 - this sounds curiously small to me, given the number of athletes and visitors that there were at the event) - what I wanted to know was had the thing actually done any good!

The real business benefit only becomes apparent when you say how many instances of faulty delivery were detected or how many food recalls were actually enabled by the system. Without this it's impossible to judge whether the insurance policy was worth while. Sure it's encouraging that the technology was successfully deployed and worked but the real payoff comes from the benefit it delivers.

I'm as guilty as the next man of writing press releases or brochures that focus on what we know about a customer's solution (and of course what they are prepared to have said about it) rather than trying to dig up things that folk haven't counted, so I'm not pointing any fingers at BearingPoint here. I guess this is a plea for more information on HOW the technology of RFID delivers value, not just on what is being done. (I'm writing myself a note to get better at it too!)