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