Meeting Demand in Today’s Supply Chain Landscape
The signs are everywhere: At your increasingly busy warehouse, in commercials and advertisements, and even in your own shopping patterns. Ecommerce is exploding and this new era of shopping is here to stay.
In fact, market forecasters expect U.S. online sales to reach $638 billion by 2022. Compare that to 2018, when ecommerce sat at $517 billion. Worldwide, ecommerce orders are projected to sit at $5 trillion in 2021, more than double 2017’s $2.3 trillion figure.
As demand skyrockets, companies are struggling to keep up. Supply for many products is scarce. Out-of-stocks are rampant. Some warehouses are even struggling to keep their floors staffed. Others are still limiting the amount of simultaneous work shifts due to concerns for employee’s health. In a supply chain landscape where expectations are high, you may wonder if it’s possible to do more with less.
With RFID, it is.
How RFID Makes This Possible
RFID creates an automated way of tracking your inventory and assets at every stage of your operations. It does this by using radio waves to uniquely identify, track and manage tagged items on your site.
Or more cut in cycle time
Improvement in shipping & picking accuracy
Receiving time reduction
Supply chain shipment accuracy
This technology increases your operations visibility, and it also lets your workers focus on other important tasks. In fact, you may notice a 25% gain in productivity after you implement an RFID system. There are many ways that RFID helps companies weather the ecommerce storm. Let’s take a look at a couple of them.
RFID Increases Inventory Visibility
Having up-to-date information about your inventory is essential to meeting demand. On a global scale, companies lose nearly $1 trillion in revenue due to not having items in stock. RFID shines in this space, collecting accurate data that you can use to forecast demand and make purchasing decisions accordingly. Now you can cut down out-of-stock items, keep your customers happy, and maximize your bottom line!
Some businesses use RFID to achieve their longer-term strategies. For example, RFID assists with building supply chain resilience, which measures how equipped your business is to deal with market change. Your RFID system’s raw data points to how prepared you are for another disruption and where you should improve.
RFID Improves Shipping Accuracy
Shipping the wrong item is a costly mistake. You’ll have to pick up the tab for reshipping fees, expediting fees, and potentially reimbursement fees. This drives up your out-of-pocket expenses, possibly costing you five times the product’s initial worth. With ecommerce exploding, there is even more opportunity for mis-ships to occur.
RFID dock doors automatically verify that the right packages are on the right truck before the costly mis-ship happens. Readers placed at a dock door read and validate that every item in a box and pallet are making their way onto the right delivery truck. There’s no need to load each box separately, either: RFID readers can read tags that are out of their line-of-sight. This not only saves time, but companies that use RFID happily report a 99.9% shipping accuracy.
Next Steps
You can learn even more about shipping verification and RFID by signing up for our five-week email series! In this series, you’ll receive more information on shipment verification technology and helpful resources to get you started. Then, give us a call. We’d be happy to talk through your current challenges and help guide you to the best solution for your needs.
Resources
Rising Expectations & Today’s Supply Chain: A Challenge: http://www.abr.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ABR-Impinj-Supply-Chain-Landscape-eBook-042121-1.pdf