Study of indirect benefits of RFID deployment: The case of the chemical substances supply chain in the European Union

In this paper we are interested in RFID deployment in supply chains. We start by studying the exploitation of these technologies to improve specific logistic missions and from a global manner we present the enhancement of supply chain management relying on these technologies. We propose to study a supply chain of chemical substances in the European Union. Then, according to the REACH regulation, companies that manipulate chemicals must develop reliable risk management policies. To comply with these requirements, the deployment of RFID provides indirect benefits such as traceability and real time inventory of goods along the supply chain. Though the potential benefits of these technologies, it is important to study the cost of the RFID integration in the supply chain.