The company has previously said it planned to put an RFID tag on every parcel it shipped globally by 2015 as part of a worldwide technology upgrade. It said the RFID technology would improve controls over shipments by giving it better tracking information, and cut costs.
But speaking at an RFID conference in the US this week, DHL’s senior program manager Bob Berg for RFID told InformationWeek magazine it had scaled back the plan.
Mr Berg told the conference that DHL still had huge implementation plans for supply chain systems using RFID technologies, but that it no longer was tying its goals to a date.
“If we went gung-ho [on an RFID deployment] it would cost over $1 billion,” Mr Berg told the conference.
“It's not going to be done on a lark. It's going to be carefully thought out. There has to be ROI.”
Mr Berg said DHL wanted to provide more “slap and ship” services in the US to customers but had not seen much demand for it. In Europe the company provides a slap and ship service to retail giant Metro which has one of the only RFID powered supply chains in the world.
Despite the interest from WalMart in RFID in the US, even WalMart suppliers had not shown much interest in the service.
Mr Berg said DHL would not be rolling out global RFID infrastructure simply to improve its own internal efficiencies at this stage.
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