Industries > Manufacturing & Distribution > Distributors & 3 PLs

Over the past two decades Barcodes have been extensively used to identify and track goods and packages. However, the growing interest in RFID, reducing cost of ID tags and mandates by leading retailers may just about push barcodes into obsolescence.

Knowledge Space International helps Distributors and 3PL harness the availability of RF tags on individual pallets to improve their operations, reduce costs, reduce shipping errors and increase customer satisfaction. Extensive research on RFID indicates that this is not yet another hype, but can have a definite impact on Supply Chain operations.

Labor Cost Savings: Recording items received in a shipment with barcodes attached each pallet is labor intensive as it requires manually placing each item in the line-of-sight of a barcode reader. But the same pallets equipped with RFID would record all items in the shipment, when a fork-lift carrying the shipment passes under a RF-reader installed on the doorway.

Improved Processes: The information about arriving shipments can be used to automatically relay Shipment Arrival Notices. Automated reading of RF tags will provide warehouse managers information about the accurate location of the pallets in the warehouse. Information from GPS systems installed in transportation vehicles when merged with data from RF tags can help pin-point the exact location of any individual pallet.

Reduce Shipping Errors: Shipment errors occur mostly due to employee oversight, and such errors are common and tolerated as cost of doing business. Oversight occurs mainly because of the manual verifying process when loading pallets into transportation vehicles. RFID has the potential to eliminate shipping errors totally or reduce it significantly. A RF reader placed at the dispatch point notifies the loader immediately of any error shipments by comparing destination of transport vehicle with the intended destination and route of the pallet.