It goes without saying that inventory accuracy is a key component to any property management or supply chain operation. By “Inventory Accuracy” I am referring to the differences between what the system of record (or the book) says the inventory is, compared to the actual physical inventory counts.
I believe it’s safe to say that any Inventory Manager wants to improve their inventory accuracy – but at what cost? Clearly, it is more important for some organizations than others.
At A2B Tracking, we frequently work with Government contractors who need to maintain audit readiness and are under increased pressure to maintain high levels of inventory accuracy. When the auditors perform a physical property inspection, they expect that the contractor is able to produce assets in a reasonable amount of time. If the contractor is unable to pass the audit they may receive a corrective action against their contract which will stall significant work and make it harder to get their next contract or even get paid for the existing contract.
Achieve inventory accuracy of 99% or better
If your organization needs to improve the accuracy of your inventory, then there is a good case for leveraging RFID. Research shows that RFID-enabled asset management and inventory control can improve inventory accuracy to 99% or better.
RFID Technology is a powerful tool that has been around for many years. Unfortunately, there are some misconceptions about the technology and specifically that it only makes sense for high value, expensive items.
For a number of years now, we have been working with passive RFID technology and a fixed gateway approach to implementing RFID for sensing assets that move between locations. Utilizing RFID gateways is a much more economically efficient system than say an active RFID or RTLS implementation that provides battery powered real-time tracking.
Active tags and RTLS have their place for very sensitive (high value) asset tracking and movement of items throughout a facility. But, unfortunately there is a high cost with having to flood an entire area with enterprise-grade Wifi in order to maintain that constant communication for real time tracking. We have found that there are many organizations who cannot justify the expense and are unable to achieve a positive return on investment with active RFID or RTLS.
Read zone based approach to RFID
Utilizing “Read Zones” requires identifying key choke-points or portals in your facility where your assets logically travel through. Positioning your fixed RFID gateways in these strategic locations, or read zones, allows you to be able to capture the movement of your assets with passive RFID tags as they move through a choke-point and into a new location.
As an example, let’s use an item that leaves the receiving dock and enters the warehouse. Let’s assume that there is some sort of an egress (either a doorway, or a hallway) between these two locations. If the passive RFID tags are captured as the item moves through that egress, or RFID read zone, a new location will automatically be assigned to that asset. This is referred to as the “last known location”.
Fixed RFID readers that are located strategically at choke-points in your facility will automatically capture your asset movements and provide you with real-time updates of your assets’ last known location.
This allows you to break your facility down into locations separated by read zones. With the knowledge of the last known location and then using mobile computing capabilities such as your smartphone, you can quickly identify exactly where that item is within that smaller, more manageable area, within a couple of minutes if not quicker.
Barcode vs RFID
At A2B Tracking we love barcodes. Barcodes are an incredibly powerful tool for tracking assets; but, by design they scan only one item at a time. When using barcode technology someone needs to locate an item, find the barcode on that item and manually line-up the barcode reader to scan that barcode. It is referred to as a “line of sight” technology.
A barcode scanning process generally does not take very long; but in comparison, that same worker could roll a pallet full of these items that are properly marked with RFID tags through our RFID read zone and capture them all automatically — without even thinking about it.
This automatic asset tracking allows RFID to improve your inventory accuracy to 99% or better. As long as the employee consistently rolls the pallet (or cart, container, etc.) through the read zone all of the items will get captured and updated with the new location movement automatically.
Size of a Read Zone
One of the benefits with a read zone based approach to RFID is that you can control the size of your locations with as many readers as you need. By using strategic choke points throughout your facility, you can achieve high visibility down to a granular level by utilizing lots of small read zones. Or you can choose a more simplified system that will provide less visibility in a much broader location. Ultimately, this approach allows you to control how much you want to invest in infrastructure in order to get the visibility that you desire.
Having the opportunity to start small and test the effectiveness of RFID is another big advantage to this system. Being able to scale a portion of your inventory and test a small RFID implementation in a controlled zone is often a smart way to get started.
Watch the video
To learn more about RFID Read Zones and implementing an affordable RFID solution watch this video taken from a recent A2B Tracking webinar. Click here for the RFID video.
