I read an interesting piece in RFID Journal about Honda's new initiative to use RFID in its supply Chain.

Based on the report, Honda of the UK Manufacturing Ltd. (HUM) has initiated what could be one of the largest UHF RFID installations thus far in the auto industry. HUM produces 885 cars each day, including the popular honda civic and CR-V. The company plans to use the technology to track auto components as they traverse HUM's supply chain, moving from suppliers' facilities throughout Europe to HUM's manufacturing plant in Swindon, England.

The auto manufacturer will affix EPC Gen 2 tags to 250,000 containers and 100,000 metal cages used by HUM's suppliers to transport components to the Honda plant, according to Andy Chadbourne, a spokesman for Intellident. The Stockport, U.K.-based RFID vendor is providing HUM the necessary RFID tags and associated software.

The tags are designed to work in environments containing a large amount of metal, each encoded with an EPC-compliant identification number. The ID numbers will be correlated with information about the parts held in HUM's existing IT systems. As containers and metal cages leave HUM's supplier sites, Intellident VisionGate RFID portals and handheld programmable RFID readers will read the tags. That departure information will then be electronically sent to HUM via Intellident Vision software, an RFID-based software system designed to help companies manage and process RFID data written to and collected from RFID tags and smart labels.