Rfid The New Innovation In Logistics Technology

By Author: bvc group
Total Articles: 10
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RFID has come a long way since its early stages in 1980s. Seventeen years ago when Internet was commercialized, only few people thought it would become part of logistics companies in India. RFID is like the Internet and very few logistics companies in India use it one of them is BVC Group Logistics. They use it for secure transportation and Gold transportation that enables the production of self-identifying packages like RFID, Barcode solutions etc.
The advantages and the solutions it has for current market needs (especially Logistics, the intended audience was also from Logistics) and the level of penetration it could have on current and future market is immense. This for sure has been changing the way things are being done in few sectors like Gold transportation and jewellery exhibition in India which requires secure transportation.
RFID is Radio Frequency Identification, a tracking system that uses intelligent barcodes to track items and is used in many industries. In Logistics sector, these are used for Electronic Product Code compliance (EPC as known in the market where major retail players in US are moving ...
... towards enforcing this compliance). This is currently being achieved in different ways by leading Apparel companies from source tagging to exception handling validation in order to improve supply chain management. The unique advantage of using RFID is that it removes human intervention completely thereby providing high business value.

RFID tags contain electronic information and can be affixed to any object which can be read at the same time -multiple items, containers at the same time by a RFID reader. Unlike standard barcodes that are being used widely in the market today, these can be read from up to several yards away and doesn't require being within the line of sight of the reader. This replaces the point and scan labour intensive method of scanning cases, cartons, pallets in a typical warehouse operation. Analysts point out that this would reduce at least 60 to 70% of time that would typically take to unload/ship goods in a warehouse, not to forget that it would completely remove human intervention. Each Tag is programmed in such a way that it is one of a kind with a unique serial number (based on the need) and this cannot be changed.

As with any new idea, this also has its own disadvantages, the primary one being its cost. This technology has been available for several years now and the main factor that is affecting the global market penetration is the cost involved in coming up with such RFID tags for different sectors. Few years back the cost involved to incorporate this technology was so huge that it got confined to few critical industries like Defence and Healthcare. With standards being drawn for such usage of tags for common compliance and the cost factor coming down drastically, this has started moving slowly into each and every sector that we are aware of and that too globally.

The market penetration has been slow and steady, and of course there would be questions raised here and there w.r.t the impact it could have on labour market (statistics point out that this technology is 99.9% accurate and drastically reduces the involvement of human intervention). Being part of Logistics sector and having known warehouse operating model, my mind started engaging on the benefits it holds, I had already drawn pictures connecting various dots from the webinar. Just like many others in the market, I am crossing my fingers and will be closely monitoring the way it changes the operating model of Warehouse Logistics operations across the world.