Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and its impacts on logistics activities.

Abstract

The competitive business environment nowadays creates a great pressure on companies. Especially in logistics operations, it requires them to adopt technology in order to innovate the process and create better logistics integration systems. Thus, the solution is to implement radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the current use of RFID technology, its major benefits and concerns when it comes to RFID implementation and examine the possible improvement for these concerns. In order to understand an overview of RFID technology and its integration in logistics system, RFID technology introduction, the benefits of the technology in logistics activities and its concern are presented in the theoretical framework. The author reached the aim of the thesis using qualitative and quantitative methods, both survey questionnaire and interview were conducted. The survey questionnaire was sent to the top 100 third-party logistics providers in 2017, such as DHL Supply Chain, FedEx Supply Chain, UPS, C.H.Robinson, CEVA Logistics, etc. The list of the top 100 companies was conducted by Inbound Logistics 2017. The interview was conducted with Sami Isomäki, who is a Technology Manager of RFIDLab Finland ry. The results of this study help to find out the major issues that hesitate logistics companies from widely implementing RFID technology and examine the possible solutions for these issues. The current use of RFID technology is recognized as stable and positive. In logistics, RFID technology is mainly used to support the inventory management. All the logistics providers strongly agreed that the increase in information visibility and real-time data, better tracking and inventory control are the major benefits. The most significant concerns of RFID implementation are cost of implementation, global standard issues and data management issues. There are possible solutions for these concerns, however it is not easy to achieve. RFID technology is believed to be strongly developed in the future and the future relation between RFID technology and barcode will be equally used in logistics chain for a long time.