RFID clothing supply chain management system

1 Overview

In the global context, leading foreign companies in the textile and apparel industry have adopted global supply chain strategies to achieve the optimal allocation of resources and capabilities needed to obtain maximum commercial benefits around the world. However, China's textile and apparel industry is still in the "world" Factory”’s embarrassing status. Only the design and production of products are valued, and the supply chain system, which is essential to support the clothing production system, has not received due attention. In terms of supply chain management and informatization level, it is far inferior to the international first-line clothing brands. big gap. Especially in recent years, with the changes in the textile and apparel industry, this lack of rationing at the supply chain has seriously eroded the profits of enterprises, reduced their market competitiveness, and restricted their sustainable and long-term development.

On the one hand, the gradual increase of clothing categories: due to the rapid development of high and new technologies, the production efficiency of clothing companies has been improved, the product replacement cycle has been shortened, and the product development capabilities of clothing companies have been gradually improved. The life cycle of clothing products is getting shorter: From a supply chain perspective, the shortening of product life cycles increases the difficulty of strategic matching in the supply chain, because the supply chain must track customer demand in a timely manner and cope with the uncertainty of clothing product demand. safety, and promptly adjusted the production plan to produce new products that meet customer needs.

In addition, the breadth and depth of customer needs continue to increase: changes in customer needs will have a corresponding impact on the uncertainty of potential demand. The uncertainty of potential demand refers to the uncertainty of the demand part that the supply chain must satisfy and the characteristics of customer demand. It is a direct consequence of supply chain uncertainty.

At the same time, the process of globalization of the clothing supply chain is accelerating: the globalization of the clothing supply chain has provided better and cheaper resources for clothing companies, but it has also made companies around the world in the same market, and those who have been protected in the past National enterprises must face competition from manufacturers from all over the world, and market competition has intensified. At the same time, because supply chain facilities are located in different locations, it increases the difficulty for enterprises at various nodes in the supply chain to coordinate with each other, and enterprises have to make a more precise trade-off between responsiveness and profitability.

Therefore, textile and garment enterprises accelerate the informatization process and create highly informatized supply chain management systems. According to individual needs, they can flexibly configure products, ensure commitments, deliver on time, and quickly respond to customers' changing requirements, hobbies, and the external economy. It has become a very urgent matter to ensure the speed, efficiency, accuracy, information integration and sharing in the process of logistics management informatization in a competitive environment.

In this regard, Heilan House, as a well-known brand in my country's clothing industry, has been at the forefront of the industry in informatizing clothing management and optimizing supply chain management processes.

2.Technical application

Like many domestic clothing companies, Heilan House has realized the importance of technological power very early, and was early involved in supply chain management represented by barcode technology. It has successively used barcode scanning in the warehouse entry and inventory stages. This method improves the informatization level of supply chain management to a certain extent. However, due to the poor penetration of barcode recognition, it must be sensed within a relatively small distance. The barcode recognition process cannot be read in batches. There are many misreadings in the barcode recognition process. In addition, the information that the barcode itself can express is too single. , the characteristics of a certain piece of clothing cannot be described more, Heilan House realized that there is still a lot of room for improvement in the information management of the clothing supply chain.

UHF RFID technology is a new automatic identification technology that has once again revolutionized the supply chain management model of the clothing industry after barcode technology. It uses the principle of radio frequency identification and can work in various harsh working environments and can penetrate certain areas. It has excellent obstacle recognition and good penetration; it can also identify moving goods and can be identified in batches. Compared with traditional barcode technology, it has significant advantages.

Heilan House is fully aware of the advantages of RFID technology in clothing supply chain management, which can effectively solve the shortage and inefficiency of original boxes in the current links from product offline to factory delivery, collection center receipt, sorting and delivery, etc. It can solve the problem of low cost, achieve accurate and fast sorting and boxing of clothing products, greatly shorten the clothing supply cycle, reduce the operating costs of Heilan House on the supply chain end, and improve the overall level of supply chain management.

3. System solution

Heilan Home provides SKU (stock keeping unit) information such as product number, color number, specification, quantity, etc. to the selected RFID tag supplier. The RFID tag supplier is responsible for writing this information into the chip and sending it to the clothing manufacturer. The clothing manufacturers then tie these tags with RFID tags to the clothing.

These clothes with tags bundled with them will be stacked one by one into cartons, sealed, and will begin to enter the supply chain of Heilan House. After entering the storage and transportation center of Heilan Home, boxes of packaged clothing will enter the RFID scanning channel machine integrated with the IFAST IOT reading and writing equipment along the conveyor line. The channel machine will automatically close the door and scan the RFID of the box of clothing. Tags are scanned. After a box of clothing is scanned, the channel machine uploads the scanned information to the RFID intelligent receipt and delivery system in real time, and the system compares the quantity of goods received and actually received. If the confirmation is correct, the channel machine will "automatically release" and send it to the next link. If the scanned item does not match the box specifications, the system will automatically check the reason and clearly indicate it on the display. The conveyor belt will send the box of clothing to the manual inspection area next to it to wait for unpacking and inspection.

Such an RFID scanning channel machine can read the information of all clothing in a standard box every 8 seconds without opening the box. It can scan up to 300 pieces at a time. The scanning speed and accuracy have reached the international advanced level. . This effect is mainly due to the core data collection equipment selected by the RFID scanning channel machine, which is the M6e series product from IFAST IOT Company.

As an important part of the receipt and delivery process of Heilan Home's supply chain, the RFID scanning channel machine's primary solution is to quickly and accurately read large quantities of tag data in a short period of time. The RFID Reader with IFAST IOT-M6e as the core has four antenna access capabilities. The reader can automatically sense the number of tags distributed in front of each antenna when switching between antennas, and dynamically switch the polling time of each antenna. The maximum Optimized to improve the reading and writing efficiency of the antenna, and based on IFAST IOT's internationally leading anti-collision algorithm, the reader can quickly establish orderly communication with a large number of tags, ensuring the accuracy of data collection.

At the same time, when reading a whole box of clothing, it is also necessary to solve the problem of signal penetration and the decrease in reading and writing capabilities caused by the dense stacking of tags. IFAST IOT-M6e has a maximum transmit power of 31.5dBM and a receiving sensitivity of -81dBm, which can ensure the acquisition of tag data under adverse conditions, providing double guarantee for the accurate acquisition of full box clothing data. Moreover, in the face of Heilan Home's daily receipt volume of 400,000-700,000 pieces and an average shipment volume of 600,000 pieces, the reliability and stability of the RFID scanning channel are also very important. IFAST IOT also has advantages in this regard. As a member of JADAK, IFAST IOT is effectively guaranteed in product manufacturing and quality control, and can carry out high-quality mass production. At the same time, IFAST IOT is involved in large clothing projects such as Decathlon and Disney. The large-scale application in China also provides a good reference for Heilan House RFID scanning channel machine.

The application of Heilan House RFID channel machine reads clothing RFID information in a streamlined manner, enabling batch scanning, real-time uploading, comparison and classification of boxes of clothing product information. After the system was put into operation, labor costs were greatly reduced. The number of workers on the operation line was only 1/3 of the previous number of workers. At the same time, the efficiency of receiving and shipping was greatly improved, and the work performance of each worker was increased to 5 to 5% of the original number. 14 times, making an important contribution to Heilan House’s optimization of supply chain management.