Every organization that receives, holds, and/or ships items hopes to achieve track and trace perfection—complete and accurate information about the inventory: what you have, how much you have, where it is, how fast it’s moving off, which items are most popular, and about a dozen other data points that affect overall supply chain efficiency.
Responding to today’s supply chain challenges—where customers and consumers demand products same-day or next-day and want the ability to choose shipping/delivery methods—requires broad and deep visibility; that kind of visibility, in turn, requires sophisticated tools that capture the information needed to make proactive business decisions.
However, too many organizations are still using the traditional pen-and-paper method to track and trace, or they use multiple apps that create a complexity that’s bottlenecking operations. Both approaches offer only limited data—not the detailed, real-time picture that’s necessary if you want to react wisely as market conditions and customer needs change.
In this article we take a look at how inventory is tracked using traditional methods in a retail environment to illustrate the downsides inherent in this approach.
Many retailers do a manual physical inventory count of items in stock to verify that the stock data they have on paper matches the inventory that’s actually in the store. It’s recorded with pen and paper and transferred to an Excel sheet, or captured with a mobile device. The process is time- and labor-intensive:
Step 1: Map the store, identifying all racks, displays, walls, and shelves where products are placed.
Step 2: Label stockroom boxes and shelves. This helps ensure that all merchandise is accounted for.
Step 3: Account for all “odd” products, such as merchandise that’s expected from suppliers, products that have been returned by customers, items that are pending fulfillment (like those headed for curbside pickup), and damaged products.
Step 4: Train staff how to perform the count to help minimize errors.
Step 5: Conduct a time-consuming inventory count, and cross your fingers that items aren’t missed and calculations are done accurately.
When a retailer is done with this kind of inventory count, they may know whether or not the stock in-store aligns with what they expected...but that’s about all they know. There are no deeper data points from which to gain insights that enable them to take action to improve their supply chain performance.
Fortunately, pen-and-paper inventory methods are falling by the wayside, being replaced by more sophisticated tools, one of the most robust of which is RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification. Today, RFID is used widely in a variety of industries for asset tracking and inventory management because it offers a far higher level of efficiency and accuracy—which, in turn, leads to:
RFID systems use short-range radio waves to send data from your RFID-tagged assets to “reader” devices that capture the information you need.
Not only do they capture an abundance of information, but RFID systems offer unique features that make them highly versatile:
RFID can be used to:
It’s not an overstatement to say that the capabilities that RFID track and trace affords—and the improvements you’ll see using this technology—could determine whether or not you survive the difficult global supply chain challenges we’re seeing today.
Lack of visibility into your inventory only compounds the shipping and fulfillment roadblocks standing in your way as you try to get goods where they need to be, when they need to be there. Not only does RFID speed inventory counts and improve accuracy, but it provides you with a wealth of information—information you need to make the decisions that will improve the performance of your supply chain.
Want to learn about RFID best practices? Take a look at our free whitepaper, Best Practices for RFID Implementation, now!
