Decision Based Fuzzy Rules for RFID Implementation in Supply Chain Management

Abstract

The increasing of supply chain costs has motivated the manufacturing companies to find ways to reduce the distribution and the warehouse costs. They considered the supply chain cost reduction as one of the main issues to be considered to survive in their business. However, the development of the new technologies gave the opportunity to the manufacturers to reduce these costs. One of the important techniques that may cut the supply chain costs is by using the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Tracking and tracing the individual parts during the supply chain network by using RFID technology is efficient key success of cutting down the supply chain costs. On one hand, RFID technology can offer a wireless write and read to update the data during the different steps of supply chain network. On the other hand, RFID is still a costly solution compared with the barcode. The objective of this research is to analyze and determine the success factors of implementation of the RFID technology in supply chain management (SCM) and to estimate the suitability of using RFID technology for different parts. Three main indexes have been developed to evaluate the feasibility and suitability of using RFID technology in the SCM: cost index, frequency index and write-read index. Then by using the fuzzy logic approach, the priority for each index was analyzed and effect of each index has been simulated.