Development of RFID based Automatic Warehouse Management System: A Case Study of ROK industries Limited Kenya

Authors

  • Fabien Ngaboyimbere Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NMAIST) Arusha, Tanzania
  • Judith Leo Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NMAIST) Arusha, Tanzania
  • Kisangiri Michael Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NMAIST) Arusha, Tanzania
  • Dinah Muteteshe Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NMAIST) Arusha, Tanzania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31695/IJASRE.2021.34076

Keywords:

RFID, Event Processor, Storage assignment, Automatic Pallet, Automatic shelf

Abstract

In the supply chain and logistics industry, the precision of the data assets inventory plays a crucial role in warehouse activities.  The operations like storage locations arrangement, inventory management, and maintaining the flow of incoming and outcoming goods lead to the success of the warehouse.  Nowadays, most people are preferring online shopping all over the world because it is faster than local trade.  Thus, there's massive information in the supply chain and logistics sector to explore in order to improve operations of the warehouse such as receiving, ordering, shipping, storage assignment to facilitate the automation in the warehouse.  This study is conducted to improve warehouse activities by automating storage and inventory management.  A software program was developed with sets of rules, and an algorithm to optimize the inventory operations with the help of RFID technology.  The predefined rules help in giving priorities to some of the selected products to store and retrieve in the indicated locations.  The UHF RFID reader is attached to the entrance of the gate of the warehouse to facilitate the reading of incoming goods.  Once the goods arrive in the warehouse, the storage location function will assign to each product the storage location and update status in the database. A handheld reader facilitates inventory management and communicates with the application via a wireless network and finally store data in the database for future use. After developing this system, a test was conducted for testing the feasibility and applicability of the system.  The output showed that the inventory management operation was made strides, and the correctness of inventory location increased from 72.8% to 99%. The cycle time moreover decreases from 50 minutes to 18 minutes which is down to 28.79%.

References

Gaukler, G. M., Seifert, R. W., & Hausman, W. H. (2007). Item-level RFID in the Retail Supply Chain. Production and Operations Management, 16(1), 6-8. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-5956.2007.tb00166.x

Goksoy, A., Vayvay, O., & Ergeneli, N. (2013). Gaining Competitive Advantage through Innovation Strategies : Application. American Journal of Business and Management, 2(4), 304–321. https://doi.org/10.11634/216796061302463

Spina, D., Di Serio, L., Brito, L., & Duarte, A. (2015). The Influence of Supply Chain Management Practices in the Enterprise Performance. American Journal of Management, 15(2), 10-18.

Boenzi, F., Digiesi, S., Facchini, F., Mossa, G., & Mummolo, G. (2015). Sustainable Warehouse Logistics: A NIP Model for non-road Vehicles and Storage Configuration selection. Proceedings of the Summer School Francesco Turco, Industrial Systems Engineering, 15(3), 5-8. https://doi.org/10.11634/21679606

Asif, Z., & Mandviwalla, M. (2005). Integrating the Supply Chain with RFID: A Technical and Business Analysis. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 15. https://doi.org/10.17705/1cais.01524

Suryanto, T., Haseeb, M., & Hartani, N. H. (2018). The correlates of developing green supply chain management practices: Firms level analysis in Malaysia. International Journal of Supply Chain Management, 7(5), 12-14.

Ballard, R. L. (1996). Methods of inventory monitoring and measurement. Logistics Information Management, 9(3), 4-9. https://doi.org/10.1108/09576059610116653

Moh, M., Walker, Z., Hamada, T., Su, C., & Range, R. (2005). A Prototype on RFID and Sensor Networks for Elder Healthcare : Progress Report. 70–75.

Atali, A., Lee, H., & Özer, Ö. (2011). If the Inventory Manager Knew: Value of Visibility and RFID under Imperfect Inventory Information. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1351606

Delen, D., Hardgrave, B. C., & Sharda, R. (2007). RFID for better supply-chain management through enhanced information visibility. Production and Operations Management, 16(5). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-5956.2007.tb00284.x

Attaran, M. (2007). RFID: An enabler of supply chain operations. Supply Chain Management, 12(4), 249–257. https://doi.org/10.1108/13598540710759763

McFarlane, D., & Sheffi, Y. (2003). The Impact of Automatic Identification on Supply Chain Operations. The International Journal of Logistics Management, 14(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1108/09574090310806503

Viegas, C. V., Varvakis, G., & Selig, P. M. (2014). Strategic Management Accounting (SMA) and Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM): Advances and challenges for integration in recent academic research. In Process Control: Theory, Applications and Challenges.

Pane, S. F., Awangga, R. M., & Azhari, B. R. (2018). Qualitative evaluation of RFID implementation on warehouse management system. Telkomnika (Telecommunication Computing Electronics and Control), 16(3), 1303–1308. https://doi.org/10.12928/TELKOMNIKA.v16i3.8400

Qiao, Y., Zhong, K., Wang, H., & Li, X. (2007). Developing event-condition-action rules in real-time active database. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 511–516. https://doi.org/10.1145/1244002.1244120

Wang, H., Chen, S., & Xie, Y. (2010). An RFID-based Automatic warehouse management system in the tobacco industry: A case study. International Journal of Production Research, 48(9), 2513–2548. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207540903564918

Poon, T. C., Choy, K. L., Chow, H. K. H., Lau, H. C. W., Chan, F. T. S., & Ho, K. C. (2009). A RFID case-based logistics resource management system for managing order-picking operations in warehouses. Expert Systems with Applications, 36(4). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2008.10.011

Li, S.G. and Kuo, X., 2008. The inventory management system for automobile spare parts in a central warehouse. Expert Systems with Applications, 34 (2), 1144–1153.

Dutta, K., Ramamritham, K., Karthik, B., & Laddhad, K. (2007). Real-time event handling in an RFID middleware system. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 4777 LNCS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75512-8_17

Tan, C. W., & Goh, A. (1999). Implementing ECA rules in an active database. Knowledge-Based Systems, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0950-7051(99)00028-3

Choy, K. L., Chow, K. H., Moon, K. L., Zeng, X., Lau, H. C. W., Chan, F. T. S., & Ho, G. T. S. (2009). A RFID-case-based sample management system for fashion product development. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 22(6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2008.10.011

Downloads

How to Cite

Fabien Ngaboyimbere, Judith Leo, Kisangiri Michael, & Dinah Muteteshe. (2021). Development of RFID based Automatic Warehouse Management System: A Case Study of ROK industries Limited Kenya. International Journal of Advances in Scientific Research and Engineering (IJASRE), ISSN:2454-8006, DOI: 10.31695/IJASRE, 7(8), 112–126. https://doi.org/10.31695/IJASRE.2021.34076

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 8 (2021): August-2021

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Fabien Ngaboyimbere, Judith Leo, Kisangiri Michael, Dinah Muteteshe

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.