RFID- transforming the supply chain in retail

The globalization of the supply chain and emerging sensory technologies (such as RFID) are transforming the supply chain.

The results of recent research by IBM shows that organisations are increasingly moving away from ‘static’ supply chains to dynamic and responsive, ‘on demand’ ones.

Following are the reasons for the same;

• Customers becoming ever more demanding.
• Product lifecycles shrinking dramatically
• Supply chains becoming increasingly more global and complex
• Companies dramatically increasing their use of global sourcing partners
• Product quality is a given - not a source of competitive advantage.

RFID has a key role to play in enabling delivery on most of the above and, judging by its uptake, it is already taking centre stage as companies seek to get closer to their customers’ actual demands while reducing inventory levels, operating costs, order-to-delivery cycle times and waste.

RFID can enable such outcomes as it allows clear visibility of what’s happening in the supply chain in real time. This can give supply chain managers the information they need to reply dynamically to business needs.

The below mentioned figure will explain this further,


 

Using RFID in this way can unlock a competitive advantage as you have accurate and real time visibility of supply chain events covering manufacturing runs, product movement and inventory management.

 

There are few reasons, why RFID is preferred over Barcodes, these are:

• It allows information to be read by radio waves from a tag without requiring line of sight scanning.

• It allows virtually simultaneous and instantaneous reading of multiple tags in the vicinity of the reader.

• Each tag can have a unique code that ultimately allows every tagged item to be individually accounted for.