The perennial problem with any business-changing technology-de-jour is not so much the financial investment as much as the time investment. How long is it going to take? Anything really significant is going to take time. From requirements definition to full-blown implementation could take years. The problem is, novel technologies don't stand still.

Take RFID for example. According to Gartner's latest hype cycle, it sits either side of the 'peak of inflated expectations', with per item on the rise, per container or pallet falling close to the 'trough of disillusionment', and both many years from the 'plateau of productivity'. However even the near term potential for RFID is there, providing it adds to or augments existing business processes.

The stumbling block that prevents even a look at many new technologies is this. How to extract the potential value without over commitment to a solution that will be thrown out as the business usage grows or evolves? RFID is one technology that generally causes this feeling, especially as it is usually closely linked to a massive investment in ERP systems and the ensuing change in business processes. Massive technology-led IT projects do not fill finance directors with joy.

A UK company is approaching the problem from a different direction. WareLite is a four-year-old start-up with a familiar challenge. It has developed a general-purpose platform for supporting business processes with IT. The platform, called BOSS, Business Operating Support System, provides a way to trigger business rules in an event driven framework. It's built on a grid computing concept of 1-to-n communicating processes, so scales over a large number of servers, and then provides the determinism and atomic processes to ensure that business logic can be applied in real time.

The challenge for WareLite is the platform could be used as the basis for many solutions. So, where to start? In the drive to win early customers, it looked at different scenarios or applications for the platform, and noticed the issues facing companies wanting to take an early look at RFID. In the time taken to deliver a solution, the technology has moved on, and the business needs have probably changed. Even the move from tagging containers to tagging the individual items creates a step change in requirements.

Anything that tags and tracks product through, for example part of a supply chain will generate a huge amount of data. This all interacts to trigger events or actions that need to take place to fulfil the business processes, and will almost certainly interact with other existing systems - both in-house and beyond. To build a solution around current ERP systems would take a significant investment in time and resources. Some companies reckon it's at least a two year timeframe.

The BOSS approach is to scale down to allow companies to start small, but use the grid model to scale up. This means a manufacturing company could make a small investment in supply chain innovation, say on a single product line, then expand it to all products if it proved successful, without having to re-architect from scratch.

The other problem is technology and integration complexity. The BOSS solution addresses this by using business rules as the core components, or objects, and combining this with XML interfaces, de-coupling the technology used from the business process. De-coupling certainly helps. Both in the de-coupling of the details of the technology from the business processes, and de-coupling the data collection from the external systems, such as ERP. If the business processes change during deployment, the changes can be incorporated without halting and restarting the system.

To provide a further catalyst, WareLite has developed a simple graphical simulator for those companies wanting to evaluate how RFID might work for them. This allows a schematic diagram to be imported, readers positioned, and tags moved through the schematic. This then triggers the business rules that have been defined. The whole process is accomplished without the purchasing of any tags or readers, making this an effective way to test out business potential of RFID with minimal outlay.

Despite the Gartner view that RFID is still five to ten years from the 'plateau of productivity', there will be many companies needing to make a start in the meantime. Using a simulator provides a low investment way to test out the business processes will help many make their first start along their way to full deployment. The WareLite platform provides a way to then scale from RFID trial to deployment and that will always find comforting to companies embarking down this route.