The global trade association, which comprises providers of IT components, networks and systems, says that Wolfram's vision led to the successful implementation of the project in Rheinberg, Germany and also the successful Metro RFID showcase in Barcelona, Spain.
The Don Percival 2005 award will be presented to Wolfram at the AIM Knowledge and Networking Forum - Europe in Wiesbaden, Germany on 20 April 2005.
The Metro Group, the world's fourth-largest retailing group with a turnover of more than €54 billion, aims to become the first in the business to install RFID technology throughout its entire process chain. By January 2006, Metro Group plans to have 300 suppliers sending RFID-tagged pallets and cases to its distribution centres.
The Future Store Initiative has played a crucial role in convincing Metro that RFID is the way forward. The centre was designed as an RFID working platform for the retail and consumer products industries, allowing suppliers to test their readiness for RFID while evaluating emerging technologies for retail.
IBM is providing the overall systems integration and technology for the centre.
The tests in Rheinberg have shown that RFID offers retailers and their customers enormous advantages, not least improving the efficiency of the supply chain and helping to reduce costs.
Using RFID, Metro believes that goods will be able to be located along the entire process chain - from production all the way through to the shelf in the store. Managing orders can be optimised, losses reduced and out-of-stock situations avoided, assuring an even more consistent availability of goods for the customer, Metro claimed.
"We see RFID as one of the crucial technologies for the future of retailing. With our large-scale introduction of RFID, we will for the first time cover the entire process chain with this technology," said Zygmunt Mierdorf, CIO of the Metro Group. "The strongly expanded and mutually supportive co-operation with our suppliers in this area will help to significantly move forward the establishment of international standards for RFID."
Wolfram has more than 12 years of IT experience within the Metro Group, and he was instrumental in forming action groups where competitors collaborated in integrating technology for more effective implementations. Under his direction, these programmes have become the leading world-class implementations of RFID in the retail supply chain.
Wolfram is also a member of national and international standardisation organisations concerning RFID and supply chain initiatives. He has served as the representative of Metro to the Auto-ID Center, is the co-chair of the EPC Global Commerce Initiative Working Group and co-chairs the GS1 Germany task force Process Modification via RFID.
The Percival Award was established in 1982 to honour Don Percival, an early founder and pioneer in the development of barcode scanning. The award is presented annually to an individual or organisation from the user community recognizing outstanding contributions to the application of automatic identification and data capture technologies.