Emerging tracking & tracing and ubiquitous computing technologies, most notably RFID, promise to change today’s business and society in various ways. These new technologies hold powerful potentials to boost process efficiency in logistics, security, health and many other areas by reducing errors and counterfeiting, superseding media breaks and accelerating processing speed, going far beyond the boundaries of existing barcode based applications. The gap between the real world of physical objects and the virtual information space is more and more diminished, the flow of goods and the flow of data approach parallelism, enabling companies to get a more precise view of their internal assets to better control and manage their processes. The connection between a physical good and its manufacturer through the whole product life cycle enables enterprises to sell interlocked services and solutions, increase customer lock in and follow new business models.
