A railway company that operates passenger and freight trains throughout Hong Kong has boosted the accuracy and efficiency of data capture related to the maintenance of its passenger cars and locomotives, thanks to the use of active RFID tags and readers provided by Hong Kong RFID Ltd.

With omni-channel, mobile, online competition and other forces at play, retail is in a state of dynamic transformation. Item-level RFID is playing a role in that transformation and major retailers are starting to adopt it in a big way.

A manufacturing renaissance is taking place in the United States. According to a recent MIT study, 14 percent of manufacturers have made definite plans to move some of their currently offshore production back stateside. An additional 30 percent are considering it. The common term being used for this is reshoring. The reshoring trend is growing and can garner goodwill with domestic customers, consumers and even legislators. But any careful decision to reshore or expand domestic manufacturing capacity will be predicated on goodwill benefits and growing profitability.

Scarmor, a logistics subsidiary of the French hypermarket chain E.Leclerc, has installed a network of RFID readers that works without middleware at 35 dock doors within two warehouses. The company continues to roll out the technology that will be used to track pallets being moved from distribution centers to roughly 58 E.Leclerc retail sites throughout the French province of Brittany.

Walmart, Macy's, JCPenny, Marks & Spencer, Façonnable, American Apparel, and others are implementing item-level RFID in a big way. Last year, well over one billion apparel items were tagged. That number is expected to rise substantially this year.

Analyst Insight: EDI continues to grow steadily each year. And with markets in growing economies yet to penetrate (Asia and South America), EDI has had a challenge making a firm beachhead in emerging markets, though EU and North American business partners from the retail, automotive, healthcare and financial services industries, to name a few, rely on and require EDI as their language of trade. - Ann Grackin, CEO, ChainLink Research

Honeywell Aerospace has started applying high-memory RFID labels to two of the parts it manufactures for the aerospace industry, with the goal of enabling the part's record to be tracked directly on the tag from birth through use by airlines, and repair by Honeywell.