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

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 out coming 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 indicated location. 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%.