No, we’re not yet directing traffic using RFID technology (wouldn’t that be scary.) But, Walmart, who plans on implementing RFID technology on an enterprise level this year, had some innovative solutions for supply chain management at the loading dock.

According to this Information Week article, a traffic light system is set up on the loading dock, awaiting arrivals from shippers like Victory Land Group, a furniture maker, and one of the participants in Wal-mart’s RFID rollout experiments. When a shipment containing RFID-tagged products is rolled into the bay, a traffic light shows red, yellow, or green to determine if the reader has picked up all the information from the shipment pallets.

I’m always interested in seeing new-old juxtapositions of technology, as in this seemingly innocous blend of the super-new and super-old. Learning about all this new RFID stuff is daunting, yet inspiring at the same time. I see MySQL becoming an industry leader in this market, because of the low-cost embeddable database market for these readers and for the aggregation needed for so much tag data. Very interested in seeing how the RFID landscape starts to take a more defined shape in the coming year or two…