RFID creates a safer and more secure world for consumers

RFID is behind numerous safety advances: it tracks the maintenance and safety records of spare parts, it can help you recover your lost or stolen bicycle and it is speeding up the product recall process.

These are some of the reasons why companies are turning to RFID. Retailers can lose more than 1.5 percent of their total sales to theft each year. For a large company, this can represent hundreds of millions of euros worth of goods that simply "walk out the door" or are removed from back office storerooms.

Aircraft maintenance companies repair and refurbish thousands of parts each day. To make sure parts don’t get misplaced on workbenches or while they are being moved from airplanes to the workshop and back, RFID tracks the parts with unique identification numbers called Electronic Product Codes (EPCs). Information in a secure database can be linked to the EPC to provide key information on ownership and maintenance history.

A recent recall of millions of toys from Asia reminds us of the difficult process of recalling dangerous goods. Consumers are among the last to be notified about recalls, and it is often impossible for a mother or father to find out if their child’s action figure is among those toys that need to be returned to stores. With RFID, producers will inevitably become more responsible for their products: The technology can be used to trace a product default directly to the maker of a specific component, such as the company that used paint containing too much lead to colour children’s toys.

In other words, RFID can’t take dangerous goods off the market, but it can make a major contribution to increasing supplier responsibility and liability, improving transport safety and speeding product recalls.