RFID Technology in Supply Chain

 

Hello everyone,

  I am Aswith Krishna Asok pursuing MBA in Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore. Recently I came across an article about RFID Technology in Supply Chain and here are some of the insights that I gathered.

                           

 Today RFID(Radio Frequency Identification) is offering exciting possibilities and are solving some of the biggest problems that are being caused in the supply chain such as collecting, managing, and analyzing a large amount of data, maintaining the labor cost as low, optimizing the operational costs, and mitigating security risks, etc.

RFID tech is today an up-front investment and it is not at all cheap one. The cost of the RFID has also significantly came done for the past couple of decades by making it more attractive for the downstream retail operations. RFID mainly uses radiofrequency waves for transferring the wireless data and without the help of contact. Barcodes and RFID scanners are different since RFID scanners don’t need any line of sight they communicate with the help of the RFID tags on each item without the need to see them individually.

Wells Fargo data centers use RFID scanners mainly in laptops for indicating whether a computer is leaving with the rightful owner by protecting from any breaching of data and also thefts. The supply chain has four elements that present mainly an opportunity for leveraging RFID technology such as in integration, operations, purchasing, and also distribution.

Good integration of communication and information sharing is the need for supply chain success. By using RFID technology sharing and accessing data has become easier, also RFID tags allow the organizations to quickly account for goods in transit and collect data about them. Day-to-day operations can help in making or breaking the company’s supply chain. RFID scanners help the company’s to monitor how their goods move through the warehouses. It is impossible for the manufacture of the goods which are needed if we cannot acquire the raw materials, here RFID provides are real-time visibility over in-stock materials and also in semi-finished materials. Logistics mainly refers to the coordination and also the movement of goods from one place of origin to the destination and for this RFID tags transmit the information about the location, temperature, and humidity of the shipment whether the package has started from the origin and has reached the destination.