The very first industrial, real-life application of RFID in adaptive inventory use case, published as case study in books and articles. All the value levers are very much valid in 2020, almost 15 years later!

1. Adaptive SCM RFID Pilot
at
Mahindra and Mahindra,
Farm Equipment Sector,
Kandivili, Mumbai
Phase-I: Standalone RFID
Adaptive SCM Application
on
Setu

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Contents
Introduction
Scope
Process
Success Criteria
Execution
Challenges
Implementation
Areas of Impact
Benefits
Remarks

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Introduction
Automatic Identification technologies allow organizations to identify objects and capture
information, providing them with much greater degrees of control and flexibility in managing
goods as they move through the supply chain.
One such automatic identification technology is radio frequency identification (RFID).
Accurately seen by many in the industry as the next transformational technology, RFID
promises higher quality information and real-time tracking.
The objective of this exercise is to demonstrate the benefits of using RFID in the supply chain
of Mahindra and Mahindra FES, in terms of tracking accuracy, process automation and
process compliance.
After a detailed study of the existing process, with help of Mr Girish Naik, we understood the
areas where our solutions add value and decided on a representative pilot implementation to
the MTL team.
The pilot was carried on for duration of 27 days, starting from the 1st
of July till the 27th
of
July. The details of the pilot are as presented in the document in later sections.
This document presents all the status of the pilot through various phases of
implementation, issues that were handled and compliance to the success criteria
decided before the pilot began.

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Scope and Application Features
Scope: Inbound material movement at Kandivili Farm Equipment Sector plant, starting from
arrivals of the materials till the time they are requisitioned and physically taken for use.
Typical Process Flow: The pilot’s covered the process flow from Point A to Point C as
described below
Point A- Offloading Station: The components off loaded in the factory premises
Point B- Tagging Station: Very close to the location of Point A the components are attached
with RFID tags with the relevant data
Point C- Storage Station: The tagged components are stored in the relevant storing space
allocated for the pilot until they are requisitioned for use at the plant. The storage area,
though simulated for the pilot, represents all the environmental conditions of the actual
storage area.
Components Tagged:
Two types of card board boxes of Spline Shaft metal bearings (Description: Bearing Pilot
Spline Shaft).
Tag Data: Each tagged component refers to 17 different fields of 10 characters each, totaling
to 170 bytes. The data is stored in a database, linked to a unique tag id.
Features:
Process
A. Inbound goods offloading
station
B. Tagging Station – Received
components are tagged here
C. Storage Station – Tagged
components are stored here
and movement tracked, clubbed
with authorized personnel.
Features
System facilitates single point of data entry
on components
PCS created from the tag database
automatically.
Storage database reflects the current
inventory at any point of time
Any requisitions will be matched with
Inventory database
Only authorized quantities and by authorized
persons are allowed to leave the storage.
Any deviation from the above results in a
popup / customized alarm. The event is
stored in an Event DB.
Component critical level stock monitoring –
beyond which the systems sends popup /
customized alarm to relevant destinations
On-demand customized reports on
movement of inventory
System to monitor FIFO based component
movement

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Process:
The overall process, after the solution is deployed across the areas that come within the
scope, is presented below:
1. Components of the said type are received at receiving station, along with respective
Physical Count Slips (which carry all the information about the batch received)
2. Each component is tagged with the data on the PCS and a unique serial number. At
this stage, all the details of the received items are stored as Received but not stored.
3. Received items are moved into the binning/storage area. At this stage, the incoming
items are compared with the ‘Received but not stored’ items and any disparity is
reported as ‘Missing’ items in the status window.
4. After successful binning, the status reflects the total stock in terms of the total
received, stored and missing items of the current as well as earlier batches.
5. Issue is done through an issue slip (as is the case in M&M’s existing process) which
carries the employee issues to, quantity and other details.
6. When items are being taken out, the systems checks for the following:
a. Authorized employee is taking the items
b. Authorized quantity of items is being taken out
c. FIFO is being followed.
d. Inventory status, after deducting the outgoing stock is more than the
minimum inventory level
7. If any of the above are not satisfied, the systems generates as event (as pop up )
and stores the event details, with time, items and employee involved.
8. For every successful Issue, the Status window updates the columns – Batch Size,
Current Size, Issued and Missing.
9. Any other movement of items - ie items without employees at the gate etc., results in
a pop-up and updated to the events database.
10. On all the steps of the process, reports can be viewed on-demand for any given date:
Components Received Report, Components Issued Report, Events Report and
Vendor Report. Status report is generated whenever there is a change in the status.
More detailed process with supporting screen shots is presented in Appendix:
Process

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Success Criteria:
We have agreed upon the success criteria for the exercise before the implementation
started and the same is benchmarked on a daily basis till satisfactory results were
obtained. The following lists Success Criteria that were agreed upon and demonstrated
(details of our route to achieving the same and the challenges we faced are presented in
the next section).
• Read accuracy to be 100% for through out the duration of the pilot.
• Functionality of the application to be 100% complaint to the defined Features, to be
ensured by our personnel physically crosschecking, in terms of
o Tagging accuracy
o Tracking of the number of items at the storage area
o Tracking of change of number of items
o Tracking of movement of items, along with the workers’ validity
o Alerting in case of erratic movement of goods, by the unauthorized person
and in case of reaching Minimum Quantity
• No more than 1 instance of failure of the application for a duration of maximum 30
minutes due to problems internal to the application (ie., excluding power failure,
network connectivity, force majeure)

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Execution:
Challenges
There were a number of challenges we had to address for the fact that the work area is
covered with metal shelves, casings and gates. The trolleys used to move the
components are of thick metal, as is the case in any shop floor. Added to this, electro-
magnetic interference, physical constraints in terms of placement of the gate to
accommodate movement of trolleys, forklifts etc posed additional challenges.
Inertia to Process Change
Post the initial trials and dry runs, the end-users are the work shop personnel who are
used to the existing process of counting and moving the items physically. Though trained
on the RFID system, most of the workers were uncomfortable to adapt to the system and
were reluctant to implement the process. Note here that the new process is EXACTLY
the same as the previous one – with minor changes in the way components are moved
in/out of the store room.
Metal
The components used in the exercise are cardboard boxes containing metal bearings.
The thickness of the box is 1 cm. A number of such boxes are moved in a trolley to the
storage through the gate antennae.
The trolleys are made of hard metal of 3 cm thickness. Presence of metal in the trolley, in
the components and in between the number of tags kept in the trolley posed serious
reading difficulties, besides the presence of metal gates, supporting poles and the bins.
Stray or missed reads
The criticality of accuracy in reading is ensured by incorporating a number of cross
checks – right from the hardware (EAS, identity and data checks) to software (business
process dependencies in terms of ‘expected reads’). The pilot was intended to prove that
the readers could sense all tags that were intended to be read, would not miss any reads,
and would not unintentionally pick up stray reads from units that were passing by.
Interference
The factory floor was filled with radio waves from other sources but the impact was
negligible as active RF was low. Though the aerial distance between the gates was 1.1
meter, the length of the cable connecting the base and the complimentary antennae had
to be 5 meters for allowing heavy trolleys. This posed a serious problem in tuning the
antennae to form a well-coupled zone.
Orientation and placement
Tag orientation (with respect to the reader antenna) and placement on the product had
an affect on tag-reading ability- especially on the components with tags horizontal to the
field.

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Implementation
Introduction
This section covers the complete implementation along with the issues that were faced during
the dry and live runs of the pilot.
The initial runs till all the success criteria were satisfactory were conducted as dry runs. After
the expected results are achieved, the same set up was run for 3 weeks. Daily Status Tracker
covers the issues and status of success criteria on a given day during the dry runs – till
satisfactory results were stabilized. These logs are used to summarize the over all
implementation cycle as presented in the last subsection.
Success
Status Tracker
_____________
Date:1st
July’04
Logged By: Chandan R
Results:
Criteria Results Remarks
• Read accuracy
• Functionality of the Application
o Tagging accuracy
o Tracking of the number of items at the
storage area
o Tracking of change of number of items
o Tracking of movement of items, along
with the workers’ validity
o Alerting in case of erratic movement of
goods, by the unauthorized person, FIFO
and in case of reaching Minimum
Quantity
• Number of instances of failure of the application
and duration
Issues:
Handover Status:
summary)
Adaptive SCM Pilot – Learnings

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Date Issue
5/07 Gate antenna tuning, positioning of antenna. Failed to generate
uniform field.
6/07 Gate antenna tuning. Reader software giving timeout error due to
serial communication error. Reader serial cable was found to be
faulty.
7/07 Gate Antenna tuning. Reader configuration changed to generate
maximum RF field. But reader was giving RF error.
8/07 Gate antenna tuned with different jumper settings to generate
uniform RF. But required zone is not generated,
9/07 Gate antenna tuned with minimum distance between the
antennae. But noise level increased and reader gave RF
communication error.
10/07 Antenna tuned with maximum distance. RF field has various
blind spots. Tags are not read simultaneously.
12/07 Software throws Invalid Employee exception – as the tags are
not being read simultaneously.
13/07 Added Issue GUI. Issue transaction assumes that issued items
are carried out immediately.
Success Criteria Status:
Criteria Results Remarks
• Read accuracy
• Functionality of the Application
o Tagging accuracy
o Tracking of the number of items at the
storage area
o Tracking of change of number of items
o Tracking of movement of items, along
with the workers’ validity
o Alerting in case of erratic movement of
goods, by the unauthorized person, FIFO
and in case of reaching Minimum
Quantity
• Number of instances of failure of the application
and duration

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Appendix: Process
1. Components received at the tagging station with PCS.
2. For a given PCS, all the details are entered into Setu GUI (Access to all GUIs and
reports is through role based authentication).

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3. For ‘Invoice Qty’ number of times, the GUI prompts the user to write tag.
End of this process will have tagged all the components with unique ID numbers and
relevant details as above. Please note that the components are only tagged and not yet
put in the binning area. A status window at this stage looks like:
4. Items are moved to the binning area.

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5. Status window at this stage looks like:
6. Issue is authorized through a GUI – which resembles the existing process. Only valid
(authorized) employee and authorized quantity (as mentioned in the Issue note) can
be taken out.
7. Any movement of the components without authorized employee results in a pop-up
(e-mail, SMS or Beep features are available).

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8. Any movement of the components not conforming to Issued quantity results in a pop-
up.
9. Any movement of the components not confirming the FIFO order results in a pop-up.
Note: points 7,8,9 result in event generation which is stored in a event table.
10. Status window after issue of items looks like:

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11. Report on received components on a particular date:
12. Report on a particular vendor:
13. Report on issue details from a particular component:
14. Report on the events occurred on a particular date: