Development of a justification tool for advanced technologies: An example for RFID

Growing competition and increasing demands from customers are forcing small manufacturers to consider investments in advanced technologies. For many reasons, such investments are often difficult to justify by means of a traditional economic analysis alone. As a result, it is often necessary to consider the system wide benefits associated with ATs in order to justify their adoption. The objective of this paper is to develop an AT project selection model that takes particularly the uncertainty, that most of the advanced technology project has, into consideration. An example for AT projects that also includes RFID is used to illustrate the proposed approach.