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We live in a great big world that is driven by a lot of business in it, and there are a lot of ways that enable the integration of technology into the operational asset of a company so that work can be done more efficiently. Farhan Masood is the CEO of a company called Solo Smart which, amongst other things, develops innovative technological solutions and we contacted him to talk a bit more about a technology that is being used increasingly for tagging communications and identification. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, according to Wikipedia.com, is an automatic identification method, which relies on storing and remote retrieval of data using devices called RFID tags or transponders.

How come RFID hasn’t taken off in Pakistan?

Better late then never but not really true. May not at a mass level but there are quite a few RFID projects on experimental basis that had been initiated in Pakistan by technology enthusiasts. On government scale, we can name ePassport at NADRA and eTAG by National Highway Authority as pretty good initiatives. These fascinating projects are suffering due to the negligence and lack of vision of the project owners who are either too busy or already cashed its commercial aspect in terms of deployment. Proper infrastructure to back up has not been provided and neither the projects been advertised to educate people what benefits they can gain by using the RFID. ePassports are currently being issued using a 2D Barcode and only a few ePassports carry RFID chips being used for experimental basis.

RFID Tag

On private scale the RFID is mainly used in the time and attendance management purposes in Pakistan. This is one area where RFID implementation can be seen spreading at a high speed. Although advances in radio frequency identification technology have enabled the early adoption in other commercial applications like supply chain management, logistics and transportation as well but I believe that although RFID has an advantage over plain vanilla bar-coding in logistics, it will take a while for it to become mainstream.

We know what makes RFID so useful. What makes RFID so expensive?

Expensive is a word that’s frequently associated with RFID, most commonly regarding the tags, but ‘unwieldy’ - well, there is no doubt some that might agree, but any major technology investment implies change, which can indeed be painful. Could a move towards RFID be complex? Yes. Would it imply process change? Yes. Is it necessarily ‘unwieldy’? Not so sure. Unwieldy tends to imply little long term benefit, and just a headache to implement. I think RFID ultimately offers significantly more than that.