Ten years ago, everybody wrote that RFID was the upcoming thing, and we would push our carts out of the supermarket and it would work. We studied that for quite a while and we couldn’t actually convince ourselves that it was true, and it turned out not to be true.

When you look at it carefully, it turns out that there just wasn’t the business case to be made for actually driving RFID. And I think a general trend in supply chain is that executives look for silver bullets, or the executives go to their CEOs and say, “We just need to do this and everything will be fine.” And quite frankly, supply chain is a lot about hard work.

Following the hype can actually be quite expensive. We have seen countless clients that have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into integrated supply-chain-planning systems, not only to see no value added but actually to see a lot of value destroyed.

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