In mid-2004, Assink first saw the writing on the wall and began taking steps to prepare for the gobs of data that would be heading his way when RFID became a reality at Kimberly-Clark. He took the unusual step of demanding that Tadych develop an RFID strategic applications plan.

Using that plan, Kimberly-Clark began focusing on two supply chain projects: One is an electronic proof of delivery program, the other is an out-of-stock management program.

Jonathan Landon, director of personal productivity and communications services, had to make sure not just that the company's centralized hub-and-spoke network could withstand the huge uptick in data volumes that RFID will eventually produce, but that it can help customers and suppliers do the same thing.

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"We've done things we've never had to do before," said Landon, such as including one business partner in an application pilot project. Extending the company's IT infrastructure past its traditional boundaries has meant rethinking its security model, and figuring out how to make relevant data, and only that relevant data, available to partners.

The biggest issue with RFID is that it pumps out data in real time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. "We have to be highly available," Landon said. "We can't just tell someone, 'Oh, we were down for the last eight hours and didn't get any reads.'"

Once the RFID technology is fully operational, the company's applications will have to handle data on a far bigger scale—that's an issue Landon is still working on. As RFID use spreads across retailing, Landon said, the huge amount of addressing and routing capability needed will clearly require an infrastructure upgrade.

For now, though, he has network throughput at about 43G bits per second, with room for expansion, so capacity is not an immediate concern. In fact, Kimberly-Clark would like to pull in more data than it currently does. "We're trying to influence the standards so there's a little space for us to use for custom data," Landon said.

At the same time, the company said it expects it will regularly dump most of its RFID data, saving only the data it needs, in order to prevent overwhelming its storage infrastructure.

Despite the many unknowns, Kimberly-Clark executives say they strongly believe that RFID will trigger a slew of new ideas they've yet to even conceive. And Assink points to the fact that RFID standards have moved far faster than UPC codes did. Today, 30 years after the bar code was first deployed, there is still not a single international standard.

By comparison, EPCGlobal passed its preliminary Gen 2 RFID tag standard in June. Kimberly-Clark has even applied for its first RFID-related patent.

"RFID is a positively disruptive technology," Assink said. "So idea leads to idea. We're not on the bleeding edge just to be bleeding."