RS-Control Instrumentation Services

In order to illustrate how RFID tags can greatly sway the fortunes of a business for the better, we shall look at a theoretical case below. Let us take the example of a furniture maker that specializes in supplying furniture to a hotel chain.

This may sound like an example with no significance to normal small businesses, but in fact, hotel chains are extremely selective and have no loyalty, so if you can satisfy these people, you can please anyone.

The main requirements of the hotel chain are that orders are met and on time, the quality of the supplier's products has already been considered to be sufficient by means of enforced ISO 9000 quality control and factory visits.

The hotel furniture manufacturer decides to introduce passive RFID tags to follow its items from the point of manufacture to the point of delivery, that is the hotel or its storage area.

Under previous conditions the producer had employed a few people to walk around with bar code readers and clip boards carrying out quality control and tracking the fulfillment of orders.

The problem was that the arrangement was still subject to human error and items still went missing, which resulted in management compensating by over manufacturing and over stocking 'just in case'.

That is a common enough scenario., but the difficulties are multiplied when you think of all the different articles of furniture that are involved in a hotel room, bathroom or lobby and if they are kept in a 200,000 square foot warehouse. Goods get lost, forklift drivers make mistakes, people forget to fill in inventory forms, get sick and take holidays.

In short, administrating a storehouse like this is a nightmare with too much stress on important employees. It sometimes leads to imperfect deliveries or worse, incomplete delivery tickets. Sometimes the order might be complete but the hotel would think it was not because the delivery ticket was wrong.

If this company were to introduce RFID asset control they could attach an RFID tag to completed pieces of furniture. The tag would say where it is, what it is, whom it is for, when it has to be handed over and what else makes up part of the order. The tag is being read constantly by the warehouse's RFID readers warning when orders are running late or are still incomplete.

Not only that but the tag can disclose what else has to be made and whether the object itself has passed quality control. It can also say which problems someone has found with it. In short, instead of a couple of people traipsing around the warehouse hoping that they have covered everything, you could have radio sensors analysing every tag in a warehouse the size of a soccer pitch, reporting back to a central computer where the warehouse manager can have access to real time intelligence, not just the state of affairs at close of business the previous day.

This should enhance the manager's chance to manage, cut down on waste, ensure complete orders handed over on time and so superior levels of customer satisfaction, which should mean more repeat orders.