مدیریت زنجیره تامین با تولید ناب و کاربرد RFID : مطالعه موردی

This study applies lean production and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chain management. In this study, a three-tier spare parts supply chain with inefficient transportation, storage and retrieval operations is investigated. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is used to draw current state mapping and future state mapping (with lean production and RFID) with material, information, and time flows. Preliminary experiments showed that the total operation time can be saved by 81% from current stage to future stage with the integration of RFID and lean. Moreover, the saving in total operation time can be enhanced to 89% with cross docking. In addition, utilizing RFID technology, the cost of labors can be significantly reduced while maintaining current service capacity at the members in the studied supply chain. Return-on-investment (ROI) analysis shows that the proposed method is both effective and feasible.

Substantial competition force companies to ensure customers’ demands can be satisfied as much as possible at the lowest cost. Therefore, companies attempt to develop new solutions to improve the quality of their supply chains and simultaneously reduce their operational costs. In the past decades, radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies have attracted considerable attentions (Sarac, Absi, & Dauzère-Pérès, 2008). Currently, RFID is emerging as an important technology for revolutionizing a wide range of applications including supply chain management. Numerous organizations are planning to, or have already adopted RFID in their operations in order to take advantage of a more automated and efficient business processes (Sheng, Zeadally, Mitrokotsa, & Maamar, 2011). Lean production was introduced by Toyota under the names “Toyota production system (TPS)” or “just-in-time (JIT)” manufacturing in the 1960s (Bruun and Mefford, 2004, Reichhart and Holweg, 2007, Taj, 2008 and Wu, 2003). JIT manufacturing aims to eliminate waste and to improve their productions by using a continuous improvement approach, including maintaining the only required inventory and reducing setup times to decrease lead times, queue lengths, and lot sizes to reach minimum cost. Lean production enables the integration of various tools in the production system and supply chain and focuses on waste elimination to reduce costs, improve quality, and decrease lead time, inventory, and equipment downtime. Numerous enterprises have applied lean production to improve their productivity and competitiveness over the past decades. This study explores the application of lean production and RFID technology for improving the logistics efficiency in a three-tier spare parts supply chain. This supply chain consists of a head quarter (HQ), one central distribution center (CDC), 10 local distribution centers (LDCs), and repair shops (RSs). HQ and CDC are responsible for supplying spare parts to ten LDC on a daily basis, and these LDC in turn supply spare parts to more than 400 local RS. HQ has an Information System (IS) and each CDC, LDC, and RS has a Warehouse Management System (WMS). There exist space for improvement in current operations with both information flow and material flow among the members in the studies supply chain, and therefore this research adopts lean production and RFID to increase the effectiveness and efficiency. Preliminary experiments show that about 99.5% average reading rate was achieved with a fixed Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) RFID reader and four antennas installed in CDC and LDC receiving/shipping docks and UHF passive tags mounted on cartons or pallets. The benefit and cost of using RFID in the supply chain management are analyzed and promoted, e.g., increasing the whole supply chain efficiency and decreasing labor cost. Furthermore, this study uses return-on-investment (ROI) analyses to show that RFID implementation is effective and feasible. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a review of relevant literature, and Section 3 analyses the supply chain operations without RFID. Section 4 redesigns a new supply chain process with lean and RFID, and Section 5 evaluates the efficiency improvement and provides ROI analysis. Finally, Section 6 draws conclusions and proposes future research directions.

This research uses VSM to analyze the factors leading to insufficient supply chain operations and applies both lean production and RFID technology to improve supply chain efficiency and effectiveness. The preliminary results in a case study (with 1 CDC, 10 LDC, and more than 400 repair shops) demonstrate that the total operation time, from current stage to future stage with integration of lean and RFID, can be saved by 81% (with 82% saving in waiting and transportation time and 63% saving in value-added time). The saving can be further enhanced to 89% (with 89% saving in waiting and transportation time and 70% saving in value-added time) with the adoption of cross-docking. Furthermore, each warehouse can reduce at least one operator while maintaining current service capacity and level in both CDC and LDC. ROI analysis with a value of 2.6 justifies the effectiveness of lean production and RFID application. The result of this study is a good reference for further improvements in supply chain and logistics system through the use of better management philosophy and modern technology. This study can be extended in several directions. With the spirit of lean production, the warehouses should conduct continuous improvement to further increase operational efficiency. It is of interest to apply RFID to transportation system to increase the traceability of deliveries. Moreover, it is important to further improve the reading rate of UHF RFID readers by adjusting the location and position of tags and the distance between tags and readers, as current 99.5% is still with space of improvement.