RFID (radio frequency identification) technology is gaining acceptance from a huge number of substantial retailers worldwide, but there is mounting concern that it is happening in a fragmented and unco-ordinated way.
E.centre, a leading UK body concerned with the promotion of RFID, is calling for an agreed standard for RFID, rather than the current ad hoc implementations.
It says several large national and international retailers are adopting RFID for their consumer goods but they are using their own versions of the technology.
In principle this could lead to a Wal-Mart edition of RFID, a Tesco edition and so forth - with the suppliers, including the smaller vendors, forced to accommodate each of the variants in order to stay competitive.
The organisation is concerned that history will repeat itself.
In a previous incarnation it was called the EDI Association (for Electronic Data Interchange, the electronic trading that predated the internet) and saw a number of small suppliers forced to have several different terminals on their desks so they could trade with the larger organisations that insisted on using their own versions of EDI.
"There is obviously recognition by everybody involved that only global standards and agreement and adherence to them will drive the roll-out [of RFID]," says Steve Coussins, chief executive of e.centre. "Otherwise the costs will rise too high."
Some retailers - Mr Coussins singles out Wal-Mart in the US and Tesco and Metro in Europe - want to implement the technology all but immediately in the absence of such standards.
Not all industry commentators see the difficulty in the same light. Andrew Mulholland, global chief technology officer of Capgemini, suggests that getting all the individual tags and readers, the mechanisms by which RFID is made to work, identical is only one possible solution to the issue.
"There are two schools of thought on what really matters in RFID," he says. "One says the whole thing pivots around tags and readers, and the other school of thought says that doesn't matter one tiny bit."
Instead the success of the idea revolves around the way information is assimilated by the existing technology and whether some sort of universal tag reader can be developed.
Mr Mulholland points to recent developments by BT: "It offers - in public, or semi-public or even on your own premises - readers that can read pallets coming off planes or something else and pass you the information. The interesting thing about the readers is that they read all four major tag types and barcodes," he says.
"This obsession with whether you're using A, B or C is important only if you're obsessional about your reader," adds Mr Mulholland.
Even if this were not the case, there are other obstacles to a global standard becoming useful.
Adrian Morris, retail manager for Microsoft Business Solutions, says: "One of the dangers in trying to produce a standard is that the best way to do it very quickly is to drop it to the lowest common denominator.
"That normally means you end up with a standard that starts to get broken because people say 'I can't do this or that with it' so they use Standard X.4, which is their version."
Mr Morris raises the issue of who would develop a useful standard; the software manufacturers and suppliers will have vested interests, while typically the independent bodies will co-ordinate it better, but do it more slowly.
His solution would be an agreed pragmatic standard as a starting point, with work by BT and Microsoft building bridges between the current versions so that the technology will operate efficiently enough in the meantime.
Peter Morgan, a consultant at PA Consulting who specialises in RFID, believes the area is further muddied by the amount of bodies involved in creating the underlying technology.
"You have a small number of chip suppliers, perhaps a larger number of people who can supply the antennae to go with the chips, then you've got people who can turn them into labels, then separate people to do the IT infrastructure for it," says Mr Morgan.
Inevitably, he says, this has left everybody developing their bespoke solutions and uniting these into any agreed standard this long after manufacturing has begun is difficult.
It may be made easier since many of the current technologies will need to change anyway, to match the emerging market needs. This is because they were developed to work with smartcards rather than fast moving goods.
"They become a de facto standard...but because they are aimed at identifying persons rather than objects, when people start to do tins of Coke it doesn't quite work," says Mr Morgan.
"People start using them anyway because they want to see how the technology works - but then they find that an iCode chip [one of the chips used in smartcards] is a sledgehammer solution for identifying a tin of beans," adds Mr Morgan.
This could be a pivotal time for RFID. E.centre held a round table event in March including Nestlé and Safeway as user representatives and found retailers lacked a clear adoption process.
In general, they adopted RFID only when it suited their business, that there was a lack of money to pay for the new scanners, software, servers and infrastructure support that the supply chain will need when the technology is implemented and the users present agreed that a standard of some sort was essential.
E.centre has found that although 88 per cent of medium to large organisations in the UK recognise the usefulness of tagging items for tracking through the supply chain, only 8 per cent were piloting the technology in any way and 85 per cent said they had no plans to do so.
These results become even more striking when it is borne in mind that the UK is seen as ahead of Europe in the adoption of RFID, and in some business areas ahead of the US.
