RFID has become a critical technology for efficiency and effectiveness improvement in production, logistics, and supply chain management. RFID can identify, classify, and manage the flow of materials and information throughout the supply chain wirelessly without human intervention in order to avoid human error. Information of an object’s current location, condition, and history can be stored and retrieved on a real-time basis, giving better visibility for decision making. In its basic form, a typical RFID system has two major components, an RFID reader (also called an interrogator) and RFID tags (also called transponders). One RFID reader can simultaneously read multiple tags mounted on cartons and pallets, and this is one of the major advantages of RFID application. In order to facilitate receiving and shipping process in the distribution center and supply chain, long-range RFID for a read range of up to several meters is required.

With RFID, the data are rapidly and automatically captured through the RFID readers and tags with less labor usage and less operation time.

The main warehousing operations consist of inventory storage, order product mixing, cross-docking, and customer service. The most important of them is inventory management, including storage/retrieval management and inventory control. The progress through RFID can be observed in different types of supply chains such as warehouse management, transportation management, production scheduling, order management, inventory management, and asset management systems.

When RFID technology is applied to the shipping process, it changes the report key-in process from manual to automatic. It took less than 1 s for the fixed RFID reader to read the data from the tag on pallet or carton and transmit them to the WMS immediately, resulting in an improvement up to

RFID in Supply Chain Management

In supply chain management, the product information that can be captured by the RFID system includes instance data (e.g., dates of manufacture and expiration), historical data (e.g., departure and arrival times), product group data (e.g., description, dimensions, and selling units), and commercial entity data (e.g., address and telephone number). RFID promises many supplies chain benefits, such as reductions in shrinkage, efficient handling of materials, increased product availability, and improved asset management. RFID-generated product information can provide an unprecedented level of visibility in the supply chain when shared among supply chain partners.

CONCLUSION: – The application of RFID improved not only the utilization of warehouse recourses but also the work efficiency of the system. Using RFID techniques can improve the accuracy of object tracking and lead time. RFID can bring value through automated data collection, the conformance of data dependencies, and improvements in visibility.