RFID in Manufacturing Industries
Today, customers expect fast delivery of quality products with innovative features and affordable prices. To stay competitive, manufacturers must strive to make the business operation more efficient to churn out high quality products at competitive cost.
RFID is poised to impact the complete business process including WIP (work in progress), Inventory management, supply chain management, warranty management and customer management.
RFID technology promises to help manufacturers answer fundamental questions that they have always struggled with:
- What quantity of goods should we produce?
- When should these products be made?
- Where do they need to be shipped?
- Where in the vast supply chain is that shipment right now?
RFID can reduce or eliminate the need for many manual processes, such as hand-counting items to keep track of inventory and can create powerful impact on the management of raw materials and reusable assets, warehouse inventory, shipments, returns processing, logistics, and many other aspects of manufacturing.
Work-in-Progress visibility
RFID technology facilitates complete visibility of item movement during all stages of production. Data is captured right where the activity happens, and is immediately linked to enterprise planning suites. With real time data on WIP a manufacturer would be able to know the time spent by the raw materials in various processes, number of goods at any time in any process. They can also identify any error happening at floor level to look for rectification and prevent losses at inventory level at any time and so on. With this information decisions would be better supported.
Warehouse management: Most companies are accustomed to knowing what's in their warehouse, but RFID promises to enable them to drill deeper, tracking each pallet, lot, or even each unit and all in real-time. There will be no need of stopping the item near scanner and individually scanning them one by one. Items will be automatically entered and removed as per their positions.
Supply chain Management
The eventual aim of RFID in retail and manufacturing is to eliminate the intermediary. A perfect supply chain would require no distribution center. Products would be delivered directly from the factory to the retail center with complete visibility. Supply would be regulated by demand and cost associated in maintaining huge-stock levels would be reduced.
It can remove the out of stock problem as introduced by JIT (Just in Time) manufacturing process without compromising on other aspects of the concept. The essential idea is that if components are used when delivered, and delivered immediately before they are needed, both manufacturers and their suppliers can realize substantial cost savings by reducing lost and destroyed inventory and also by reducing warehousing costs
Assets Tracking
Knowing the location of certain assets and their usage status can be very critical at times. Moreover managing thousands of assets across an organization can be a horrendous task to the assets manager.
With automatic assets management, information is captured immediately and on real-time basis saving hundreds of hours of your human resources.
Research findings
Based on a research report, a manufacturer could boost sales by 1 to 2 percent by reducing out-of-stock items; decrease inventory by 10 to 30 percent by cutting the amount of safety stock kept on hand in case demand suddenly rises; and reduce shrinkage by 10 percent. This is in addition to less tangible benefits such as gaining more insights into why goods get returned.
The real savings from RFID comes not from simply deploying the technology, but from improving the entire business process as the technology demands.
Orizin Solution
Our RFID solutions can enhance the efficiency of companies engaged in all facets of industry/manufacturing, including:
- Aerospace
- Pharmaceutical/life sciences
- Automotive
- Paper
- Electronics/technology
Orizin’s offerings include software solutions integrated with hardware like RFID readers (desktop, wall-mountable, and hand-held) along with antennas and tags which can integrate with enterprise mobility elements to offer significantly increased levels of operational efficiency.