Improving responsiveness of supply chain through RFID visibility technology

As the supply chain becomes more complex, the ability to gain a consistent view of business operations, especially, to track in real time a certain product or pallet becomes more important. Establishing visibility of product flow across the supply chain is one means to achieve this goal. This in turn can adversely affect the responsiveness of supply chain and decision making processes. The RFID visibility system can offers a way to get a complete view into all of the supply chain functions, including procurement, planning, logistics and order management. The system provides easy-to-use reporting dashboards that help company detect trends and conduct predictive analysis for business processes. In this paper, we present a framework of responsive supply chain system by using RFID technology is presented. A sub module of supply chain event management engine is included in the proposed system. Then, the two processes (i.e., the distribution processes and the transportation processes) that are responsive by means of RFID are described. Finally, as a case, an order picking process is demonstrated to show how RFID can realize the promise of supply chain visibility. Intuitively this does makes sense - increased the response in the operational processes, and lead to a number of benefits.