Sales conversations, pre-sales site surveys, implementation handoffs, post-go-live audits. Nearly a decade in AIDC in India. Here is how that shapes the way I think about RFID and barcode decisions.
Most salespeople have not been inside a deployment. Most deployment engineers have not sat in the conversation where expectations were set. I have been in both rooms.
Clients often arrive with a solution already decided. My job has never been to simply validate that. The most useful thing I can do is ask the questions most vendors save for three months into a struggling deployment.
Does your barcode system actually work — and if not, what specifically is it not giving you? Where do your suppliers label — at source or at your dock? Has your receiving process been mapped, or does it vary by shift supervisor?
These questions slow conversations down. I ask them because I have seen what happens when they are skipped. The project gets approved, the hardware goes in, and six months later someone is watching 70% read rates and wondering what went wrong.
Pre-sales is where I have done the most detailed technical work — site surveys, RF environment assessments, tag selection, read zone design, middleware architecture, ERP integration planning. A pre-sales engagement done properly is essentially a process audit with a technology recommendation at the end.
The RF environment is the most consistently underestimated factor. A tag that reads perfectly in a demo room behaves differently on a steel part on a conveyor with fifteen other reader zones nearby. The only way to know is to test in the actual environment.
I have done site surveys where the pilot changed the entire recommendation. Vendors who skip the pilot are optimising for speed of sale, not for whether the deployment will work.
My project involvement has been during implementations and post-go-live reviews. This has given me a clear picture of the most common failure modes.
The most frequent one is not technical. The person who approved the project does not manage the floor. The supervisor who needs to retrain their team was not consulted during planning. The IT team arrived in the final week.
These are process and change management failures — and they account for the majority of underperformance I have seen in Indian RFID deployments.
A mid-sized organised apparel retailer in India — around forty stores — deployed RFID for inventory management. The business case was clear: inventory accuracy running at 72%, nearly three in ten items the system showed as available were not on the floor, mislocated, or under the wrong SKU.
When we audited the deployment, we found three things. First, source labelling had reached only 55% of vendors. The rest were shipping untagged cartons being hand-labelled at the dock with encoding errors. Second, staff were using RFID readers the same way they used barcode scanners — one item at a time, standing still, instead of walking the zone.
None of those were technology problems. When we extended source labelling, rewrote the cycle count procedure for RFID, and enforced WMS location discipline — accuracy moved to 96% within one quarter.
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