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By using the highly accurate, real-time and unattended monitoring capability of RFID to track raw materials, work-in-process and finished goods inventory manufacturers can improve visibility and confidence into their inventory to enable overall inventory levels, labor costs and safety stocks to be reduced. Readers covering warehouse racks, shelves and other storage locations could automatically record the removal of items and update inventory records. If an item was misplaced or needed urgently to complete an order, fixed-position readers or a worker with a mobile computer and RFID reader could automatically search for the item by reading for its specific ID number.

Shipping & Receiving

The tags used to identify work-in-process or finished goods inventory could also trigger automated shipment tracking applications. Items, cases or pallets with RFID tags could be read as they are assembled into a complete customer order or shipment. The individual readings could be used to automatically produce a shipment manifest, which could be printed in a document, recorded automatically in the shipping system, encoded in an RFID tag, printed in a 2D bar code on the shipping label, or any combination. For example the Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) data structure, which is commonly used in bar codes on shipping labels, could be encoded into RFID to facilitate automated handling. The new RFID application could be very effectively integrated into existing business processes because it takes advantage of data structures that are already supported in enterprise databases and software applications.

Manifest information encoded in an RFID tag could be read by the receiving organization to simplify the receiving process and to satisfy requirements like those for advance shipping notices (ASN), so there would not be processing delays if the physical shipment arrived before the electronic data interchange (EDI) transmission with the ASN information.

Having complete shipment data available in an RFID tag that can be read instantly without manual intervention is very valuable for cross dock and high-volume distribution environments. Incoming shipments can be automatically queried for specific containers. If a sought-after item was present, it could be quickly located and selected.

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* Contributed by: -
Narendar Lokwani,
Alumni of IIM Bangalore,
Currently working as Business Development Manager at Aztecsoft, Bangalore.