Today we had a lecture about RFID. We were discussing difficulties that this technology is having to be widely spread. Many things were related with the necessity to attach the chip, the quality of the chip, where to locate the chip, etc. But, what happen if, for example, the whole box thanks to nanotechnology is covered with chips? What if you could print chips and antennas using nanotechnology? Thinking on that I’ve found interesting things related with nanosensors, nanotechnology ink that contains whole chips and antennas on it that can be used to print chips and antennas on boxes, products or whatever thing?
CHEP stands for Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool.
CHEP is the owner of every pallet. You save a lot of money of fuel because you don’t have to transport empty pallet. Instead of moving pallets they save the moving empty pallets. They are using RFID to check where the pallets are.
Here there is an interesting video from CHEP explaining how they are using radiofrequency in their own pallets:
The reason for coding is to identify and to communicate. Communication can be made on different ways:
People with people
People with macines
Machines with machines
Products with products
Products with machines
The point is that barcodes permits communication between products and people, but RFID does not, they need additional information that can be read by a person.
Sina and Janina made a presentation about fleet management. Fleet management comprises the target oriented, optimal planning, supervision and control of the fleet operations based on the availabe resources, considering internal and external influencing factors. A special focus is on the integration of organizational processes with modern information systems.
Fields of application:
Obcject tracking (vehicle tracking): where are they, are they moving…
Health and safety tracking: special important for police or ambulances.
Fuel and speed management: Can be controlled from a center.
Sales order transmission
Route planning
Driver management
Vehicle diagnostics
Route planning:
Serves to arrange different transport orders to tours of a vehicle fleet. There are different standard problems like:
Travelling salesman problem: Find the shortest way of a circular tour (starting point till end point) that is as cost effective as possible that visits a certain amount of customers exactly once.
Vehicle routing problem: is an extension of the travelling salesman problem which various vehicles are available at a depot.
Pickup and delivery problem: consignments are picked up at one place and transported to their destination.. Pick up locations and the destinations have to be in the same tour and a full truckload PDP is supposed. It’s similar to what some low cost airlines do like Ryan Air.
In route planning there are 2 approaches:
Dynamic route planning.
Static route planning.
Location tracking:
Controls supply chains and move products to the market faster. It is also necessary to monitor assets, prevent inventory loss and track vehicle fleets.
Companies must consider how to track inventory an a smaller area or across a wide area.
Related to tracking technologies there are different alternatives:
RFID: Local area and indoor tracking.
GPS: Signals received from satellites to track movements of objects moving great distances. A very interesting video about GPS can be found by clicking here.
Advantages:
Improve efficiency and productivity
Reduce operating costs
Speed up logistics activities
Transparency of all the transport events.
Automatical data transfer from the order entry system.
Optimal order distribution to the tours (cost, time and customer optimal).
Sonia Martín gave us an interesting presentation about Incoterms. First thing is that Incoterms is an abbrevaiation for International Commercial Terms, so it’s related with international transportation. The transaction agreement has to follow some rules that you should know and that are defined by the Incoterms.
Transportation is about you won something and give it to a third party on certain conditions. It takes some time and many things can happen during that period of time, for example, a change on price conditions. It’s also interesting to know that it also defines who is the owner of the product during the transport.
There are many different alternatives. It’s main characteristics are:
Does not cover transfer of ownership and property rights. It’s only about risk.
With international transaction its compulsory. Otherwise you will not be covered.
Define key elements of international contracts of sale.
Reflect the parties’ agreement to divide costs and risks between parties
Provide the buyer and seller instructions regarding the carriage and delivery of goods.
Can be used for purchasing parts both within the EU and outside the EU.
The following picture shows a transportation chain from moving the goods from a factory to another market.
Recent comments