Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), as the name suggests, uses radio frequency to communicate. There are two components involved in an RFID system; an RFID tag and a reader. The tag sends out RF waves that are picked by the reader as soon as the tag enters into the close vicinity of the reader.
RFID technology has been used for various applications and has improved the day-to-day operations of many industries. It is widely being used in the supply chain process of many industries. A specific application of RFID in the area of the supply chain is shipment verification.
What Is Shipment Verification?
Consider yourself as a business owner who sells garments and shoes in-store as well as online. You have received ten orders on your online store, and you need to ship them out as soon as possible. Your staff puts the clothes and shoes ordered by those ten customers and packs them up in ten identical boxes, each having a unique RFID tag.
Before you ship the boxes to the customers, you must make sure that the items present In the box are exactly what the customer has ordered. You need to match the clothes and shoes’ color and size and check if this is exactly what the customer had ordered. This is called shipment verification.
Why Is Shipment Verification Important?
The thought of online shopping is often affiliated with a bad experience in many people’s experience. This is because countless times, customers have been cheated on in the name of online shopping. The absence of shipment verification often leads to shipping the wrong or incomplete products to the customers, which leaves a terrible impression on online shoppers.
Shipment verification enables sellers to send the right products to their customers. It saves them from losing their online customers and helps them build a good reputation. Moreover, it saves the seller from losing money because if the wrong products are shipped and not returned, the seller has to bear the financial loss.
Sending the wrong products also requires additional effort in negotiating with the customers to send them the right product. Not every customer would send the wrong shipment back and wait for the right products. Hence, the seller has to hire a professional customer service representative solely for this task, which is an extra expense for the seller.
How Can RFID Improve Shipment Verification?
Integrating technology helps make the processes more accurate, but it also saves time that was previously spent in running the same process without technology. Likewise, RFID in shipment verification saves the company staff from checking each shipment against a piece of paper containing the list of items. A simple RFID scan is what’s needed to verify shipments with the help of technology.
As soon as an order is received, it is saved in the computer database of the company. Upon packing the shipment, an RFID tag is printed and pasted on the shipment box. When the box is leaving the warehouse, a final shipment verification is performed via an RFID reader, which scans the tag and matches the products present inside the shipment box to the order saved in the database. If the items present in the box do not match the original order, the reader alerts the company personnel, saving them from sending the wrong shipment.
RFID is an important tool that is used to improve the operations of many companies. The supply chain department takes advantage of RFID to improve many processes, including shipment verification. If you are a business owner looking for an excellent solution for shipment verification, then RFID is the best thing you can invest in. It will not only save you from sending the wrong parcels, but you will also gain more customers by maintaining a good reputation in the market.
