RFID battles bogus drugs

The electronics industry has been counting on RFID's adoption as the antidote to drug counterfeiting, says EETimes.

However, legal wrangling and federal foot-dragging, abetted by the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, are raising concerns that the technology's adoption for tracking drugs through the supply chain may no longer be a given.

That possibility looms despite the damage inflicted by counterfeit drugs, whose distribution has reached epidemic proportions. Fake AIDS and malaria drugs kill thousands of people - some put the estimate in the hundreds of thousands, annually, across the globe.

Alien Technology introduced new RFID tags and readers, along with a new strategy: focus more on the opportunity for "closed-loop" applications, reports Information Week.

RFID tags in the supply chain, the most famous example being Wal-Mart's request to suppliers to tag pallets and cases, has not progressed as fast as the RFID industry had hoped it would, notes Ronny Haraldsvik, VP of marketing at Alien.

Yet the company sees growth in using RFID for closed-looped applications, such as in-store inventory tracking and asset management. Indeed, the slow uptake of RFID in Wal-Mart's own supply chain has prompted the retailer to focus on improving inventory levels in its stores with participating suppliers.

Item-level tagging took a step forward a few weeks ago with the announcement that German retailer Metro Group is launching what is said to be the first end-to-end UHF item-level shopping experience, says MMH.com.

The pilot programme will be deployed in the menswear department at Galeria Kaufhof, a Metro-owned department store in Essen, Germany.

Galeria Kaufhof is going to take everything in the menswear department, right down to the socks, as part of the pilot, the company says. After the pilot, they'll evaluate the data and determine whether it makes sense to tag everything, or to simply tag high value items.