Laundry and laundry operators in Britain use RFID to manage tens of millions of miscellaneous quantities easily.

The website Supply Chain Digest points out that RFID (radio frequency identification system) will eventually replace bar code and become the most common supply chain application, but the process may take a long time. After all, for many applications, the rate of return on investment in RFID is still rather uncertain, especially in the field of replacing bar code systems.

However, in some cases, the essence of automaticRFIDreading can solve the problem that barcode can not overcome. The best portrayal of Berendsen, a British laundry detergent maker, deals with towels, tablecloths and sheets across North European hotels, restaurants, hospitals and other customers. Millions of hands are handled every day, and the management of inventory and washing is a huge challenge.

Berendsen executives revealed that because of the complexity of the business, the company handled millions of disappearances every year. Duncan Machmillan, director of the IT department, pointed out that Brendsen usually poured into 1 million items a day and had to know the progress, speed and time of the whole process, but in fact it was not in control of every detail.

With millions of items per day, it is impossible to track each piece through a scanning bar code, but if you embed a RFID tag in the cloth, you can automatically master a lot of things. Berendsen will know whether they are in the customer's hands, or have already returned to the company's stock, and whether they have been washed and delivered to the guest. Household.

In fact, Berendsen has been experimented withRFID多年来,但是结果是有限的,because it is a difficult challenge to find washable and pressure resistant materials that can withstand numerous repeated washing and dehydration. Fortunately, Berendsen found Tagsys products that met the requirements of the United States, and Machmillan said that although some of the Tagsys labels still have some damage, most of the life span is longer than that of the cloth. Berendsen can now scan a large number of items up to 1000 pieces at a time, and can quickly grasp their dynamics and direction, such as whether the number of sheets is correct when the entire batch is given to the customer. Not only that, Berendsen can also grasp the time when customers must return what products. Berendsen is now using Microsoft (Microsoft)'s Azure cloud platform to handle and manage RFID data. In addition to improving the inventory management process, Berendsen believes that the data traced by RFID will help the candlestick first and make the company forecast the future trend.

The convenience and foresight of RFID is that bar codes are far from the same. After all, the latter is too difficult to rely on manual processes. Berendsen inventory management is still quite rare in the business community. However, other enterprises using bar code tracking may be suffering from problems that have been encountered by Berendsen. RFID Technology may be They will benefit them.