Fresh produce RFID inventory app fruit & vegetable handling & control
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the reference scenario, highlighting main problems. The proposed reengineered model and its implementation in a real pilot project are reported in Section 3. Main details related to the software system architecture are summarized in Section 4. In Section 5, a description of the hardware adopted in our work is reported. A system validation is discussed in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 summarizes the conclusions and sketches future works.
RFID inventory control for fresh produce: Main Requirements and Open Issues in the Fresh Vegetables Supply Chain
The quick perishability of the IV gamma products, typically characterized by a shelf life of few days, makes the fresh vegetables supply chain, shown in Figure 1, a very interesting scenario.
Fresh produce RFID inventory app fruit & vegetable handling
Figure 1 Fresh produce RFID inventory app fruit & vegetable handling
The fresh food supply chain.
The three main actors involved in this supply chain are as follows.(1)The farm, which produces in farmland and greenhouses the raw materials (e.g., salad, lettuce, rocket, etc.).(2)The transformation company, which purchases and handles large amounts of raw materials in order to produce packaged vegetables.(3)The retailer, which, in general, sells finished products such as peppers and capsicums to the end consumer.
In order to study the main open issues of the analyzed scenario, one of the biggest fresh vegetables producers in the South of Italy, Jentu S. Agr. r. l. [21], was investigated. It includes two production centers located in different sites but is characterized by the same product flows.
In the following, the two phases of vegetables cultivation and products transformation are separately analyzed in order to better identify the main points where the use of innovative technologies, such as RFID, NFC, and EPCglobal, could improve the production capacity of the company. Let us observe that the conducted analysis did not involve the transportation process of the harvested vegetables, from greenhouses to the transformation factory, because it is not interesting from a reengineering point of view, since it does not affect on the products quality. In the considered company, in fact, greenhouses are located very close to the transformation factory.
2.1. Vegetables Cultivation
The cultivation phase affects the whole life cycle of vegetables, and it includes the activities of seeding, growing, harvesting, and so forth. All these activities are usually coordinated by an agronomist.
3 reasons why RFID boosts your business
25. May 2021
RFID technology streamlines inventory management so that all items are known and visible throughout the supply chain. With this insight, you are able to boost your business as you replace assumptions with observation, estimates with facts, and confusions with certainty.
RFID provides insight into your business
RFID (radio frequency identification) is used to identify and register individual objects, including items. The technology is controlled by radio waves that communicate between a tag on the item and the RFID reader. RFID technology identifies the location and number of specific items in record time – even if the item is in the backroom or in a cardboard box.
RFID for inventory management can solve a known challenge in the retail industry, where many retail chains experience insufficient insight into the inventory in the stores and in the warehouse. The lack of overview ultimately makes a bad influence on the overall customer experience.
Read about three reasons why RFID boosts your business below.
#1 RFID transforms your inventory management processes
Replace your old, manual inventory counting methods with automated hands-free RFID technology that provides insight and overview of your inventory. Accurate inventory data ensures the right fact-based knowledge base to be able to make the best decisions for your business.
With the right insight into your warehouse, you can avoid excessive inventories that you need to spend unnecessarily many resources on storing and handling. This way you will avoid having dead items that are now out of fashion or season. At the same time, you get automated messages that make it easy for staff to see exactly which items are missing where.
RFID and Inventory Control
What is RFID?
RFID stands for Radio-Frequency Identification – which is a small tag like electronic devices that consist of a small chip and an antenna. The chip is capable of carrying 2,000 bytes of data or less.
The RFID device serves the same purpose as a barcode or magnetic strip on the back of a credit/debit card; it provides a unique identifier for that object. Just as a barcode or magnetic strip must be scanned to get the information, the RFID device must also be scanned to receive the identifying information.
How does RFID work?
A RFID system has three parts:
A scanning antenna;
A transceiver with a decoder to interpret the data;
A transponder – the RFID tag – that has been programmed with information.
The scanning antenna puts out radio-frequency signals in a relatively short range. The RF radiation does two things:
It provides a means of communicating with the transponder (the RFID tag);
It provides the RFID tag with the energy to communicate (in the case of passive RFID tags)
This is an absolutely key part of the technology; RFID tags do not need to contain batteries, and can therefore remain usable for very long periods of time (maybe decades).
The scanning antennas can be permanently affixed to a surface; handheld antennas are also available. They can take whatever shape you need; for example, you could build them into a door frame to accept data from persons or objects passing through.
When an RFID tag passes through the field of the scanning antenna, it detects the activation signal from the antenna. That “wakes up” the RFID chip, and it transmits the information on its microchip to be picked up by the scanning antenna.
In addition, the RFID tag may be one of two types. Active RFID tags have their own power source; the advantage of these tags is that the reader can be much farther away and still get the signal. Passive RFID tags, however, do not require batteries, and can be much smaller and have a virtually unlimited life span.
Watch a video demonstration of RFID.
#2 RFID strengthens customer service
Today, consumers expect to have a shopping experience with easily accessible information, instant customer service, and easy check-out. If your stock numbers are uncertain and unreliable, every item will not be visible on the floor and in the warehouse.
Increased inventory insight makes it possible to make all items available to your customers, no matter where they want to buy. At the same time, it provides the best conditions for good customer service when the sales staff can spend less time searching for product placement and availability. When all items are available on all platforms, it is easier for your customers to locate where they can find the items with certainty.
#3 RFID for loss prevention
If you have several stores and inventories, it can be difficult to track all the losses that may occur. With integrated inventory management for POS, you can identify items, location, and movement data. Knowing where each item provides an intimate insight into how products move. This insight allows you to prevent lost sales due to lost inventory.
RFID can also be used for loss prevention in warehouses and stores. By knowing the location and movement patterns of each item, you can become wiser about blind spots and details of the theft. With the exact time and place of the item’s disappearance, you can more easily supplement your report with video recordings.
for fresh produce
Auto pallet RFID location tracking.
Pallets put onto truck are auto added to order, and checked for accuracy.
Pick up a pallet and its RFID instantly selected.
Add pallet/bin to production line and its auto added to batch for traceability
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RFID Fresh produce inventory pallet control
RFID Fresh produce inventory pallet control
Zero waste
Stock rotation and expiry can be eliminated through automatic alerts, automatic FIFO enforcement, staff are guided to the exact location of fresh produce that must be processed or sold first.
In the cultivation phase, the use of NFC tags is proposed to identify both the operators and the fields where vegetables are cultivated. In particular, greenhouses and fields are partitioned into small portions, where only one type of product is cultivated. Each of these plots of land is uniquely identified by a NFC tag placed on a wooden pole. In such NFC tag an EPC code, encoded with the SGLN (Global Location Number) schema, is stored. The agronomist is provided with a badge containing an NFC tag, and she/he uses an Android smartphone equipped with NFC technology to store all information about activities performed on crops into the Field Log, avoiding the use of paper notes. More in detail, at the end of a treatment on a specific plot of land, the agronomist identifies herself/himself and the treated plot of land, bringing the NFC reader integrated in her/his smartphone to the tag placed on the badge and on the pole, respectively, and automatically stores all data about the performed operations in the mobile Field Log application. These data are immediately sent to the information system of the producer company, thanks to a wireless connection (i.e., 3G). It is noteworthy that the use of small plots of land allows a considerable reduction of the amount of resources used, such as fertilizers and water (i.e., these are used only where needed), while ensuring the production optimization (i.e., it can be slowed or accelerated on the base of the requests of the company). Furthermore, during the harvesting phase, the use of bins and pallets tagged with passive UHF RFID tags is suggested. In this step, the agronomist, after identifying herself/himself as previously described, uses a portable UHF RFID reader, connected via Bluetooth with the smartphone, to scan the EPC code applied on each bin of raw materials. Finally, this association is sent to EPCglobal-based traceability system and stored in the EPC Information Service (EPCIS) repository. This solution aims at enabling a complete traceability, which started from field.
3.2. Products Transformation
As previously described, bins and pallets of raw materials, which are moved into the transformation cycle, are tagged with passive UHF RFID tags. This type of tag is considered mainly because it is able to guarantee high performance in presence of multiple readings. Furthermore, thanks to a native feature of the EPCglobal standard, a traceability system in the whole supply chain can easily trace information at different layers (i.e., pallet, bin and product). In particular, EPC Global Returnable Asset Identifier (GRAI) [23] encoding scheme is used to tag pallets; EPC Global Individual Asset Identifier (GIAI) [23] encoding scheme is used to tag bins. According to the reengineered model, the incoming warehouse of the company is equipped with a RFID gate composed of one UHF RFID reader and four Far Field antennas in UHF band. This configuration, in fact, is able to guarantee high performance in terms of successful reading rate of bins. A worker, after performing the weighing process, moves the pallets through the gate, enabling the automatic identification and validation of all incoming bins. The retrieved data are immediately compared with the information contained in an electronic version of the delivery note and saved in the information system of the producer. In such a way, the quality control manager has only to store data about the weigh and the quality control check executed on the accepted materials. All information not necessary for products traceability, but important for the company, are stored in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) database. For this purpose, an ad hoc Web service has been developed. This solution aims at removing efficiency problems, due to the manual execution of control and registration operations, currently performed as described in Section 2.2.
In the reengineered model, pallets and bins of raw materials stocked in the storage warehouse are tagged with passive UHF RFID tags and, therefore, an operator, by using a portable UHF RFID reader, can easily identify the appropriate pallets or bins to move into the manufacturing process. Two snapshots of the application used by the operator in this phase are shown in Figure 2. Let us observe that, also in this case, the combined use of RFID and EPC is able to overcome the efficiency limits previously described.
What happens if an RFID doesn’t scan?
This can happen because the RFID has been removed/fell off, or placed well outside the scan zone. In this case the forklift driver can simply type the pallet number into farmsoft to select that pallet.
RFID fresh produce inventory management for better traceability and less fruit & vegetable waste
Address the challenge of origin traceability in fresh produce; "Traceability - Your Product in the fresh produce pipeline," includes results of projects using RFID traceability for field to the shelf. "With recent outbreaks of food borne illnesses, the vegetable industry has been proactive in developing a plan to trace fresh produce to its origin," said FFVA marketing & international trade division director.
The seminar, covers lessons learned in the traceability project conducted by the PMA and the Canadian Produce Marketing Association that tested the feasibility of using RFID to track product starting at the distribution level.
rfid-fresh-produce-inventory-pallet-control
rfid-fresh-produce-inventory-pallet-control
"Many obstacles were overcome during the creation of this system. The seminar will show participants how this was accomplished,". Guest speakers senior vice president and general merchandise manager of perishables for Wal-Mart, and Doug Grant, chief information officer for The Oppenheimer Group, a Canadian marketer of fresh produce from all over the world.
Peterson oversees all meat, produce, dairy, frozen, floral, bakery and commercial bread operations for Wal-Mart Stores, its domestic Supercenters and the new Neighborhood Markets. Grant serves on several industry committees; including co-chair of both Can-Trace and CPTTF Traceability committees. He received the 2003 Canadian Produce Man of the Year award. The convention is to be held 26 to 28 September 2004 in Florida, USA.
The ability to trace food to its origins has become an increasingly critical issue for biosecurity and food safety, and many food manufacturers are looking at how best to apply the concept to fresh produce. In a separate move, a partnership between Merit-Trax, Syscan and Sensor Wireless was recently formed for this specific purpose.
Merit-Trax Technologies has selected Syscan International as its exclusive supplier of RFID technology for its Trax-IT Fructus software application. The application is designed to record and report quality inspections and environmental conditions of fresh fruits and vegetables from harvest to retail.
"Merit-Trax has developed an innovative software/hardware offering for the fresh fruits and vegetables segment of the food industry supply chain that is a perfect fit for our RFID technology," said Syscan International president Axel Striefler.
"The immense potential of the fruit and vegetable marketplace is extremely exciting for our company and the sector is highly synergistic with our meat and seafood segment. We believe that Merit-Trax will play an important role in the deployment of our technology in the Americas."
Sensor Wireless has been selected to supply its sensor technology, which will provide environmental and physio-chemical information to complement the system.
The Merit-Trax solution provides traceability and automates the capture of the physio-chemical quality and environmental data of fresh produce. This, says the company, enables producers to measure the benefits of precision farming methods.
The technology also provides traceability to verify the quality of fresh produce as it moves through the supply chain by monitoring temperature and environmental conditions in real-time.
"Our Trax-IT Fructus software provides traceability, quality and inspection management in real-time from seed to the retailer's backdoor," said Merit-Trax director of sales and marketing Bob Aubertin.
"We strongly believe that Syscan's RFID technology will play a significant role in delivering an effective, efficient, value added application for our customers."
The application will be compliant with the EAN/UCC Global Standards for traceability and with international regulations for exporting produce to markets outside of Canada.
Particular attention must be also paid to the choice of the type of tag to be used, since such tags must be used in critical conditions and, in particular, in humid environments, which absorb RF energy. Another important issue still open in the design of an effective traceability system in the fresh vegetables supply chain is related to the integration of management systems of all involved actors. Vegetables producers are generally small local farms without a proper information system, and therefore, actors interact through traditional channels (i.e., phone, fax). However, since the manufacturer can be considered the main actor of the fresh vegetables supply chain, a complete integration of the production company systems could represent an important starting point.
This work proposes an EPC-based gapless traceability system for the fresh vegetables supply chain able to exploit the combined use of different auto-identification technologies, such as RFID, NFC, and the less expensive DataMatrix. Particular attention was focused on the producer, and, therefore, on the early stages of the supply chain, which include farming in greenhouses and manufacturing of packaged vegetables.
The proposed item-level tracking and tracing system is characterized by a perfect integration among the adopted hardware and software subsystems in both the greenhouses and the transformation factory, preserving the role of agronomists and reducing the costs for the adoption of new technologies. Specifically, an innovative and low-cost hybrid system, in which the gapless traceability is ensured by the combined use of EPCglobal, passive UHF RFID solution, Android NFC smartphones, NFC tags (i.e., passive HF tags), and the less expensive DataMatrix technologies, is proposed.
Furthermore, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) [20] is adopted to deploy both traditional and innovative management services in the greenhouses. A clear separation between the logical EPC-based traceability architecture, and the physical infrastructure is a key factor in the proposed system, as it ensures a smooth, gapless, and flexible product traceability both in the greenhouse and in the transformation factory. To validate the proposed reengineered model, a pilot project was implemented in a big Italian producer company. Measurements of the main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) [13] demonstrated the benefits derived by the use of implemented traceability system in a real scenario.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the reference scenario, highlighting main problems. The proposed reengineered model and its implementation in a real pilot project are reported in Section 3. Main details related to the software system architecture are summarized in Section 4. In Section 5, a description of the hardware adopted in our work is reported. A system validation is discussed in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 summarizes the conclusions and sketches future works.
Innovative gapless traceability system able to improve the main business processes of the fresh vegetables supply chain. The performed analysis highlighted some critical aspects in the management of the whole supply chain, from the land to the table of the end consumer, and allowed us to reengineer the most important processes. In particular, the first steps of the supply chain, which include cultivation in greenhouses and manufacturing of packaged vegetables, were analyzed. The re-engineered model was designed by exploiting the potentialities derived from the combined use of innovative Radio Frequency technologies, such as RFID and NFC, and important international standards, such as EPCglobal.
The proposed tracing and tracking system allows the end consumer to know the complete history of the purchased product. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the potential benefits of the reengineered processes in a real supply chain, a pilot project was implemented in an Italian food company, which produces ready-to-eat vegetables, known as IV gamma products. Finally, some important metrics have been chosen to carry out the analysis of the potential benefits derived from the use of the re-engineered model.
as the choice of food, because of the adverse reactions that particular components could cause if taken.
rfid-fresh-produce-inventory-pallet-control
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RFID Fresh produce inventory pallet control
RFID Fresh produce inventory pallet control
problem if it arose,” said Scott. The RFID system is generally only cost effective for high volume chains where there is repeat business.
Good communication and training with staff is important to ensure correct installation and reliable operation. Over the 4 years, accessing and sharing the data with supply chain partners has increased shelf life of the fruit on arrival at the importer by up to 50% by:
Ensuring cooling of mangoes down to 13˚C before dispatch from the pack-shed and cutting the time spent at the facility by half. This has included better use of fan-forced cooling.
Re-cooling of some consignments back down to 13˚C by the freight forwarder
Requesting importers to adjust holding temperatures when these deviate from the preferred range
Scott said, “All up, this has meant faster movement through the chain at more appropriate temperatures”.
rom the package to the customer by means of a reader, and the data is saved digitally in a remote server.
This ethanol sensor can have potential in other applications, such as in alcometers.
The sensor layer is part of a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, and the sensor data can be read wirelessly using an RFID reader in, for example, a smartphone. The sensor transmits information about the freshness of the food in the package to the retailer or customer. The freshness data can be stored in real time in the cloud, enabling the comparison of food quality with its previous or later condition.
A similar optical readout based on the colour change of the ethanol sensor was also developed for a smart-phone.
The sensor and the RFID tag can using printing techniques be manufactured into a label or sticker and easily attached to a food package. The price of the sensor will then be low enough for use in food packages.