Inventory of stock items, inventory in minutes thanks to RFID

The company cooperating with the state matriculation project is in charge of servicing the equipment in the individual schools and in the central warehouse. Because they wanted to speed up the retrieval of serial numbers when checking in with the customer and also when pickingfrom the warehouse, they simply needed to retrieve the serial numbers of the individual components (computer, scanner, printer). With the solution being an RFID tag in each device, the customer approached us themselves. And because we at CODEWARE offered him a total solution, i.e. terminal, tags, their printing and software, he chose us.

Tags - smartlabels, i.e. printable labels that contain an RFID UHF tag - we ended up printing only the resolution according to the device (countingscanner, scanner...), although it is of course possible to print specific serial numbers on the tags directly for inspection. We transferred this information to the database, which the RFID terminal with 2D code reader Alien ALR-H450 has thanks to wifi online connection.

Checking in with the customer then becomes a lightning-fast affair. With the Alien ALR-H450 terminal, the operator reads the 2D code of the kit for the school from a distance of a few decimetres and is shown the tags paired with the kit number. The tags of the equipment in the room paired with the barcode are then retrieved. If everything matches with the items that are in the room, then it just checks for functionality and leaves. If not, the device is traced or a report is generated about the missing item. Let alone picking from stock or receiving into stock. The individual devices are just placed on the dispensing counter and the gun trigger is pulled. The serial numbers are reloaded into the database in a hundredth of a second and only the composition of the set of all devices is checked.

With all these operations, it eliminates the hassle of having to print the serial number when searching for thescanner, open the printer, lift the computer and turn the scanner upside down, but most importantly, you get all the information into the database online and without error.

The biggest time saver, however, is when taking inventory of the warehouse. A warehouse worker, scanner in hand, walks between the shelves...and he's done. You can't have the classic barcode serial numbers being torn off, scratched, illegible, or hard to access... in short, everything is done in a few minutes.

In this solution, in addition to the Alien ALR-H450 terminal, which reads 2D codes and RFID UHF tags, we used smartlabels - RFID-T-ALN9840 UHF tags, also from Alien. They have decent readability even behind a thick layer of plastic or in a warehouse with metal shelves. The software running in the terminal for reporting to the ERP system and back was programmed in Android. In the end, we only used black and white thermal transfer printing on a TSC-TTP-346MT printer to print the tags and 2D control codes, but it is of course possible to to use colour printing, which we provide on the Epson TM-C3500 printer, which is then even clearer for the operator.