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In order to illustrate how RFID tags can really influence the fortunes of a company for the better, we shall take a look at a theoretical case below. Let us take the example of a furniture maker that specializes in the supply furniture to a hotel group.

This may sound like an example with no relevance to normal small businesses, but in fact, hotel chains are extremely choosy and have no loyalty, so if you can please these people, you can please anyone.

The main requirements of the hotel chain are that orders be met and on time, the quality of the supplier’s products has already been considered to be sufficient by means of compulsory ISO 9000 quality control and factory visits.

The hotel furniture producer decides to introduce passive RFID tags to track its products from the point of manufacture to the point of delivery, that is the hotel or its storage area.

Under previous circumstances the producer had employed a few personnel to walk around with bar code readers and clip boards carrying out quality control and following the fulfillment of orders.

The problem was that the arrangement was still subject to human error and items still went missing, which resulted in management compensating by over manufacturing and over stocking ‘just in case’.

That is a common enough scenario., but the difficulties are multiplied when you think of all the different articles of furniture that are involved in a hotel room, bathroom or lobby and if they are kept in a 200,000 square foot warehouse. Goods get lost, forklift drivers make mistakes, people forget to fill in inventory forms, get sick and take holidays.

In short, administrating a warehouse like this is a nightmare with too much pressure on important employees. It sometimes leads to incomplete deliveries or worse, imperfect delivery tickets. Sometimes the order might be complete but the hotel would think it was not because the delivery ticket was incorrect.

If this company were to initiate RFID asset control they could affix an RFID tag to finished sticks of furniture. The tag would say where it is, what it is, whom it is for, when it has to be delivered and what else makes up part of the order. The tag is being read continuously by the warehouse’s RFID readers warning when orders are running late or are still incomplete.

Not only that but the tag can disclose what else has to be manufactured and whether the object itself has passed quality control. It can also say which defects someone has found in it. In short, instead of a couple of people walking around the stockroom hoping that they have covered everything, you could have radio sensors analysing every tag in a warehouse the size of a soccer pitch, reporting back to a central computer where the warehouse manager can have access to real time intelligence, not just the state of affairs at close of business the previous day.

This should enhance the manager’s opportunity to manage, cut down on waste, guarantee complete orders handed over on time and so superior levels of customer satisfaction, which should lead to more repeat orders.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is now concerned with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

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