Tracking system design for a production warehouse of automobile condensers

Abstract

In order to survive in a harshly competitive market, a company needs to enhance not only its core operational efficiency but also the performance of other business functions, including the supportive ones. As such, in this thesis, we will explore how we could improve the performance of one important supportive operation in a Thai automobile condenser manufacturer, namely the warehousing process, using RFID tracking technology.

RFID tracking technology is brought into consideration by the company’s management team due to its current warehousing issues, including inventory mismatch, inventory misplacement, and faulty delivery. We found that the root cause of these problems was stemming from inventory information inaccuracy as most of its operations was manually operated. Based on this observation, we thence explore how such a technology could be exploited so that inventory information, as well as other related physical operations, could be improved.

In order to achieve such a goal, we need to fully understand not only the RFID technology - its capability and limitation - but also the integration between the underlying technology and the current warehousing operations. Eventually, we have been able to design an RFID tracking system applicable for the case study company taking both technicality and financial analysis into consideration. Based on our preliminary calculation, overall lead time could be approximately reduced by 50%, while total labour cost could be potentially reduced up to 15%. The payback period of the investment is also projected at 8 years, but it could be sooner depending on tag prices, which seem to be decreasing over time.