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Friday, April 20, 2012

The Practical Uses Of RFID Passive Tags

By Owen Jones


The usage of RFID tags has been gathering speed for several years, but 2010 has increased proliferation for three key reasons: 1] cheaper equipment and tags, 2] increased dependability and performance (up to 99.9% accurate now); 3] the adoption of an international standard for UHF passive tags.

Cost has always been a damping issue, but a Korean firm has declared that it will have passive RFID tags for sale for about three US cents each by the end of 2011

Historically, the biggest user of RFID tags was and still is the US Department of Defense. The armed forces use smart tags to trace the containers of their hardware and sometimes individual articles of hardware too. The aviation industry has also been using them worldwide for a long time.

The latest industries to find a use for the passive tags are financial services for IT asset tracking and health care, where more than 60% of the top medical apparatus companies are using passive UHF RFID in 2010.

Companies that have not come up with a dependable system to track their stock and know exactly what they have of everything that they sell are apt to carry surplus levels of stock to ensure they can supply their customers' demands.

If you can reduce excess stock by using improved information, you can: trim down investment, storage space, labour costs; and expand asset utilization, boost stock turnover, facilitate faster billing cycles, all of which will significantly contribute to cash flow.

In short, the adoption of RFID:

1] Eases stock control and item location in real time, which reduces product search time, reduces inventory levels and enhances control of the manufacturing process. 2] Improves compliance, enhances work-in-progress (WIP) productivity and reduces the cost of the finished goods. 3] Enables the real-time monitoring of production, order fulfillment, and distribution procedures and their degree of efficiency. 4] Improves profitably and ability to meet demand quickly and lowers inventory costs. 5] Lowers labour costs by getting rid of manual procedures. 6] Improves order and shipping accuracy by helping to ensure that orders are shipped complete, error-free, and on time, which thereby increases customer satisfaction and the probability of return orders. 7] Provides extremely accurate real-time data capture by means of warehouse management systems (WMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

The way forward is to start with the goods-in bay. Goods arrive with shipping labels, but they are often poor in quality and information. It would be best to create a new 'identity badge' for all items received at this point. All the pertinent information that you have on the items delivered can be put of an RFID tag and attached to the pallet, the crate or even the goods themselves.

Now these items can be added to stock and the computer will always be able to reveal what the goods are in the box, how many of them there are and where they are located in the warehouse.

The simple procedure of creating an RFID tag at the unloading bay and attaching it to the items received can save hours of time wasted checking up on stock levels and thousands of dollars wasted in overstocking.




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