An Experimental Approach for Developing RFID Ready Receiving and Shipping

Abstract:

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and related technologies have been touted to allow exponential improvements in supply chain logistics and management. However, many industrial users have indicated that these technologies have not provided the anticipated benefits. The two complimentary strategies required to address the RFID reliability are: to improve the reliability of RFID technology and to design the supply chain infrastructure that enables RFID. The focus of this paper is on designing the supply chain infrastructure to enable RFID by developing guidelines for “RFID Ready Facilities”. These guidelines were developed based on a set of experiments conducted in the RFID supply chain laboratory. These guidelines were developed by using Design of Experiments (DOE) to determine the operational and facility factors that impact RFID reliability. The three different packaging strategies were tested on packages, boxes and their various combinations. The main factors considered in the experiments were the following among many others: Package Orientation (PO), Tag Placement (TP), Package Placement (PP), Reader Location (RL), Box Orientation (BO), Tag Placement on Box (TPB) and Tag Placement on Package (TPP). Based on the DOE results, general guidelines were developed for RFID packaging.