How RFID Significantly Helps Reduce Costs In The Warehouse
From its beginnings in retail, RFID has now made a name for itself across various industries. This popularity boost can be attributed to its wide use of applications that excel in vital areas such as asset management, in particular, security, and location tracking.
Apart from its benefits in optimisations and enhancing efficiency, one of its other lesser-known advantages is its capacity of reducing costs measured in time and money. The initial investment in RFID equipment can be high, especially if a business requires tags of the active kind, but its ROI can be recovered within a reasonable and acceptable time.
Discover the three ways in which RFID helps save key business resources.
Increases throughput at receiving bays
Even to this day, traditional barcodes are used in many business in their fixed-assets such as warehouses, factories, and other similar operations. Although it is technically making use of technology, barcode technology is inherently limited in that it can only scan one item at a time in reception bays and needs direct line-of-sight.
This slow albeit steady process can cost businesses valuable time that could be better used elsewhere. By upgrading such systems with RFID, throughput levels in the receiving process are proven to significantly increase. This is all possible due to RFID’s innate capability to scan multiple items at any given moment, even without the need for a direct line of sight.
If the process is further improved to eliminate the human factor, businesses can save costs both in time (due to the enhanced speed) and money (no need to pay for extra manual labour during stock taking).
Improves picking in fulfilment centres
In fulfilment centres for a business’s online branch, picking individual items and orders for delivery is considered as one of the most expensive and labour-intensive activities in the fulfilment process.
With the application of RFID tags, warehouse pickers can transform their workflow dramatically because they will be able to know the contents of every box in an instant, granting instant verification and significantly reduced picking errors.
Provides up-to-date location tracking of supplies
Each item in the supply chain can be equipped with RFID tags, starting from raw materials from the suppliers to the finished products that will be placed on the shelves. Having precise details and figures about outgoing and incoming shipments allows warehouse managers to verify operations status, ensuring daily, weekly, and monthly progress levels remain on schedule.
With that said, workflow processes may have certain mishaps, such as delayed shipments that may arise every now and then. But with the aid of technology like an RFID asset tracking system, managers can immediately discover such issues and act sooner rather than later to rectify such issues. The inaction due to the lack of timely data is completely eliminated and this ensures a productive workday.
Without a doubt, RFID technology itself is now an indispensable asset to any business that deals with tangible materials and products. Thanks to the efficiency gains reaped from its implementation, not only is optimisation easily realised, but cost-saving measures are one of its main benefit. If there’s a need for RFID equipment to improve business operations, reach out to RFID companies like e-TagRFID to get a solution that’s customised to individual business needs.
