What is Supply Chain Management? Essay

The supply chain management is considered as a management concept from past two decades as the customers are concerned about timely and safe delivery. The competitiveness has been increasing among the companies to deliver the products as quickly as possible to the customers all around the world. This has made the supply chain management as a vital tool for the management. This is also measured as a competitive parameter for the companies.

In its basic form, a typical RFID system has two major components, a reader and tags, as shown in Figure 3.1. These tags are made from a tiny chip, also called an integrated circuit (IC), that is connected to an antenna that can be built into many different kinds of tags including apparel hang tags, labels, and security tags, as well as a wide variety of industrial asset tags. The tag chip contains the product's electronic product code (EPC) and other variable information so that it can be read and tracked by RFID readers anywhere(Impinj 2015).

track the target once it is attached on an RFID tag. Passive tags are used to attach on the target object because they are much cheaper, long lived, lightweight and have a smaller foot print. The reader can communicated with host computer through RS232.

RFID systems are currently being used in manufacturing plants to track parts, stay informed of work in progress, reduce product defects, increase throughput, and manage production of given products. Big name retailers such as Best Buy, Metro, Target, Albertson’s, Hewlett Packard, and Wal-Mart are leading the way in implementing RFID systems. These retailers recognize the need to improve inventory efficiency, ensure products are available to customers as needed, decrease theft, and cut down on costs associated with tracking and processing inventory.

Mellat-Parast and Spillan (2014) defines supply chain management as the method of handling material and information moves from the beginning, through the organization, and to the end-user. This is a very important factor of organizational strategy.

The RFID is considered a significant improvement over the conventional barcode, which needs to be read by scanners in "line-of-sight" fashion and can be stripped away if the paper product labels get ripped or damaged. RFID can also facilitate inter-organizational E-commerce initiatives such as continuous replenishment or vendor-managed inventories (Smaros and Holmstrom, 2000).

The radio frequency identification is the system, which uses the radio wave to read the information the tag. The system consist of three main components RFID tag or transponder, which identify the data carrier in RFID, RFID tag reader or transceiver, which read data from and write to transponder and data processing subsystem, which use the data obtained from the transceiver.

A passive RFID tag, more commonly used, is one that is not connected to a power source. These tags rely on the electromagnetic field that is generated by specific RFID tag readers to create enough electrical charge to transmit the stored data in radio waves (Venkateswara, 2011).

According to our class text Supply Chain Management’s goal is to create fast, efficient, and low-cost network of business relationships to get a company’s product from concept to market. In order to understand the goal we must know that the supply chain is the process the raw materials of a product go through in order to be available to the consumer. The relationships that the business creates are needed in order to create the product, each process the product goes through creates value, the supply chain is often called the value chain. Internet technologies are increasingly making the supply chain management process much more efficient and worth the initial investment. The supply chain management life

Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID) is basically a special tag implanted into a product which can identify and track the product via radio waves. These tags can carry up to 2,000 bytes of data. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that transmit radio signals which are put onto packages or shipping containers to help organization identity product locations and movement. They have many different application in both manufacturing and service industries, since RFID tags are being embedded in virtually everything, including clothes, supermarket

RFID technology has recently become one of the revolutionary element in supply chain management. Companies these days want to reduce the costs of their Supply

This paper introduces the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) in Supply Chain Management (SCM). While RFID has a more prominent number of advantages than its ancestor, the standardized tag, it as of now includes some significant downfalls that numerous organizations still consider restrictive. From one viewpoint, RFID is profitable in light of the fact that it doesn't require line-of-sight scanning, it acts to lessen work levels, upgrades perceivability, and enhances inventory management. On the other hand, RFID is a costly solution, lacking standardization, it has a small number of suppliers creating end-to-end solutions, experiences some unfriendly sending issues, and is blurred by security

Most of the stores in the future will use this technology to enhance their business and keep it safe too. RFID can help in every area of retail stores ranging from management to security. Tagging the products with RFID tags result in the following advantages.

Agility, speed and visibility are required into all the manufacturing process during all stages to ensure high accuracy of delivering goods. There are a number of challenges that the retail business face before implementing the RFID like lacking transparency, time consuming and labor intensive manual work and challenging warehouse management, and production planning. All these are prone to human error. The RFID focuses on prime issues like out-of-stock (OOS), inventory accuracy, product location and loss detection. Implementing RFID with the business process enhances the replenishment practices of the company, decreasing the out-of-stocks.

RFID methods utilize radio waves to accomplish this. At a simple level, RFID systems consist of components: an RFID tag or smart label, an RFID reader, and an antenna. RFID tags contain an integrated circuit and an antenna, which are used to transmit data to the RFID reader