rfid and inventory control?

Question

I had a job interview for a company in Northern Illinois.  One future project is implementing a system to control the inventory of reusable custom pallet racks for engine parts and transmissions

The main part of the job is working with vendors developing and ordering the racks

I want to do some research to include in a follow up letter

These reusable pallet racks are very expensive and are shipped to multiple locations so the extra expense of the tags and readers would be minor to the savings if the inventory was better controlled

Currently things are entered by hand on a microsoft spread sheet so there is room fo improvement.

I might want to explore bar coding but that would still need people to scan the bar codes

I would appreciate help in my initial research.

BurrintheSaddle · Accepted Answer

RFID or barcode scanning is the away to go.. In terms of tracking and costs, in terms of reusable pallets each pallet i assume is assigned a pallet_id and a shipping location, this is the method tracking. 

Upon shipping and receipt you would have to have warehouse staff scan each inbound and outbound pallet. 

My take would be a little bit more involved, create a SQL database with a table that contains a pallet ID, and ship to location, with each new transaction the ship to location would need to be updated. 

There are very good inventory packages one can use to do this, Depending the size of your business generally inventory is tied to the accounting system, if so, the table may already exist to do this, or you may have to make a special tracking table for it. 


tracking_table: 

pallet_id
location
date 
time

this type of table would be able to give you a history of any given pallet, it would tell you where one it as at a particular point in time. 

in terms of location, this can be a customer_id or a warehouse_bin_id.

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rfid and inventory control?

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