Today, the presence of wireless information capture and transmission pervades just about every facet of the supply chain. For example [17],
The problem of gathering accurate pallet dimensions (DIM) in
high-◾
demand, cross-docking warehouse environments without slowing pallet movement was solved at one company by calculating the weights right on the forklift with the pallet dimensions transmitted wirelessly to warehouse computers.
A trash collection firm in San Diego responded to complaints that trash was
◾
not being collected by embedding sensors in RFID technology on the truck’s back gate lift to record every barrel emptied at specific locations for wireless feedback to the central office.
For haulers of frozen or refrigerated goods, temperature-monitoring
equip-◾
ment was installed that provided wireless feed of temperature records starting
from the distribution center to the end of the channel with the retailer or restaurant customer.
The use of RFID, Bluetooth, global positioning systems (GPS), and other tech-nologies, working in tandem with cloud computing environments, Web Portals, and back-end systems to track everything from apparel, equipment, and appliances to animals and even people is transforming the information processing capabilities of the supply chain and promising to enable a new dimension of business management.
In general these toolsets for monitoring and tracking can dramatically assist everyday business uses such as providing supply chains with tracking capabilities, solving or averting problems, and increasing efficiencies.
Wireless can be defined in its most rudimentary form as the transmission of data between devices that are not physically connected. A wireless device may be anything from a personal digital assistant (PDA), to a laptop, a two-way pager, a global positioning satellite antenna, or a remote sensor. The data communication can occur at short range using infrared technology, at a wider range using high-speed wireless LANs located on a fixed structure, or globally using satellites. The goal of wireless technologies is to provide mobile workers access and input to any database, any time. It enables collaborative information exchange where physical colocation is not feasible. It also assists in tracking, locating, and managing mov-able assets such as cargo, containers, laboratory equipment, and delivery trucks. By creating networks of objects, wireless technologies not only have the ability to expo-nentially improve the flow of information through the supply chain at the speed of light, they also can provide the intelligence to examine patterns and trends about channel business strengths and weaknesses [18].
RFID and American Apparel American apparel, the largest U.S.
clothing manufacturer, has used RFID since 2007 and is implementing it in 46 of its 300 stores. As the only supplier to its stores. data about the products never has to leave the system to be shared with outside companies.
Every garment is accompanied by an avery dennison RFID before arriving at a store. A motorola reader captures data from the tags at the store’s receiving docks and posts into an inventory management system. The RFID tags are removed at the point of sale and another reader logs the transaction and alerts the employees
that a replenishment action needs to be performed.
Sales at stores with the RFID systems are 14% higher on average than the non-RFID stores. In addition, staffing levels are 20% to 30% lower because employees don’t have to spend time performing manual inventory checks.
Finally, stockroom inventory in RFID enavled stores is down 15% as compared to non-RFID stores.
Source: Weier, Mary Hayes, “Slow and Steady Progress.” Information week issue 1,248, (November 16, 2009), P. 33.
Probably the most talked about of the wireless devices is RFID. While the technology had been around since the turn of the millennium, it began to gain traction with the announcement by Wal-Mart that their top one hundred suppliers had to have RFID labels at the case and pallet level by January 2003. Wal-Mart hoped to use electronic product code (EPC) tags, which store details about prod-ucts and transmit them to inventory systems using RFID chips and readers, to create a more efficient supply chain. However, by the end of 2009 only about 600 of Wal-Mart’s 20,000 suppliers were participating in the effort. Despite the global recession of 2008–2009, ABI Research, a marketing intelligence company special-izing in emerging technologies, estimated total revenues from RFID transponders, readers, software, and services would exceed $5.6 billion in 2009. Analysts expect the market to each more than $9.2 billion in 2014 [19].
Despite its benefits, however, the widespread use of RFID has yet to occur.
Several reasons come to mind. To begin with the RFID tags are too expensive for universal use (7–15 cents a tag in 2009). Second, the technology is complex and costly to implement, requiring not only investment in the chips, but also readers, software, and the construction of new business processes. Third, no standard for tags and data formats has been formally adopted. Fourth, there have been problems with the technology itself. Some Wal-Mart suppliers have had problems with liquids and metal in their products that block the tag’s data transmission. Fifth, the existence of networks sophisticated enough to make RFID data useful is not there. And finally, requirements by major companies mandating usage and a general realization of the inherent value in RFID by businesses have yet to materialize. Some companies simply are skeptical about realizing a reasonable return for the effort and expense [20].
There can be little doubt, however, that as wireless technology expands and matures, it will become an essential building block of SCM. Although the RFID-enabled supply chain has not materialized (tags for retail goods accounted for just 10% of the two billion tags sold worldwide in 2008), the technology has enjoyed a wider success in the public sector, particularly government, the military, and smart card projects for passports, ID cards, and prepaid transportation cards. Wireless enables a wider audience of participants within the organization and outside in the supply network to bring automation and efficiency to a new range of processes by making information ubiquitous and real-time. While there are still many issues to resolve, wireless technology is destined to have as much of an impact on business and technology architectures as the arrival of the Internet. In the meantime, the evolutionary nature of the wireless revolution will enable companies to implement and experiment with the technology by focusing on high-payback applications cur-rently available to the marketplace.
Amazon’s elastic compute cloud Amazon is giving its elastic compute
Cloud customer ,the ability to bid on unused computing capacity. The new acquisition model, called ‘spot instances’, lets Amazon web services users bid for computing power and pay by the hour and have their jobs processed if their bid exceeds Amazon’s fluctuating spot price.”
How it works is a customer posts a maximum bid. If the bid exceeds the spot price, their jobs will be run and price, their jobs will be run and priced at the current spot price. Customers with lower bids will have their
jobs terminated and queued until the spot price falls below the original bid.
According to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, this arrangement provides customers exact control over the maximum cost they would incur for their workloads, providing them with substantial savings. Amazon offers two other pricing models: on-demand instances (using a published rate) and reserved instances (pre-paid at discount rates for use up to three years).
Source: Claburn Thomas, “Amazon Auctions spare EC2 Server Capacity.”
Information week, issue 1,253, (December 21, 2009).