Competition is heating up among airline shops, OEMs and independent providers to give customers faster turnaround times for MRO. At the same time, the supply chain is spreading to increasingly remote regions around the globe. To meet these twin challenges while keeping a tight rein on costs, MRO managers are turning to radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

The commercial aviation sector now uses more than 60 million RFID tags, for everything from tracking parts to finding lost luggage. The world’s air forces are embracing RFID as well, to track and maintain airplanes, helicopters and other assets wherever they’re deployed.

Aviation’s reliance on RFID will only grow, regardless of economic or budgetary conditions. This trend was closely examined at the 2009 Avionics Maintenance Conference (AMC) and Airlines Electronic Engineering Committee (AEEC) — known by the combined acronym AMC/AEEC, held March 30 – April 2 in Minneapolis. The yearly confab is designed to help set universal standards for avionics engineering and maintenance. Maintenance managers and avionics engineers from major OEMs and airlines dominated the attendance.

My colleague Bill Carey, editor-in-chief of Avionics magazine, attended the conference and wrote a daily blog dedicated to the proceedings. His blog dispatches were recorded and archived on Aviation Today; you still can access his blog at http://www.aviationtoday.com/blog.html.

I wrote about RFID for Aviation Maintenance last year (see the July 2008 issue). The topic is worth revisiting; I spoke with experts in the field.

Greg Gilbert, product management director at the consulting firm Manhattan Associates, emphasized that RFID is an enabling technology. "For any enabling technology, it’s very hard to prove the business case," he said. "Prove the business case for your laptop. You can’t. Prove the business case for your BlackBerry. You can’t. But it’s what you do with it afterwards that allows you to drive the business value. So you have to build on top of it and then figure what the value is beyond that."

Gilbert pointed to the promising results of the early RFID work undertaken by his clients. "A lot of our customers have conducted several pilots and already work with the exchange of the data," he said. "That’s really where the big benefit is. It’s not what you do physically on the distribution center floor. If that were the answer, our customers would have already done that, but it’s the ability to see both forward and backward into the supply chain information that they’ve never seen before."

Michael Crane, Cisco Systems, Advanced Services senior director, said that the companies that have successfully adopted RFID have been the ones with the "courage" to change their processes. "Everyone recognizes the value but then depending on the strategic nature of what you’re trying to do, you’re looking at changing some significant processes to implement RFID, so it’s more than just ‘barcodes on steroids,’ " Crane said.

Joseph Tobolski, Accenture senior director, suggested that RFID is not merely about reading sheer volumes of data.

"Interpreting that data is important," he explained. He noted that an RFID system must include sufficient middleware tools and applications to provide an analytical overlay, to make sense of the data in real time.

RFID does not produce just a stream of undifferentiated information, akin to water blasting out of a fire hose. RFID data must be up-to-the-second and actionable, a goal that requires computing capabilities of mind-boggling sophistication.

One big take-away from the RFID discussions at AMC/AEEC this year is that RFID is not a technical fix in response to mandates. It’s a way to add value to a company’s services and to its products and to the entire enterprise.

In April, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced his "reformist" 2010 military budget, he targeted super-expensive legacy programs such as the F-22 Raptor for cutbacks, while at the same time boosting funds for new technologies such as RFID, which is already proving its worth in regional "hot spots" such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

For corporate managers as well as battlefield commanders, RFID increasingly serves as the "supply chain brain" within complex enterprises of vast global reach. RFID tags are indeed barcodes on steroids — and then some.