GAO RFID Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management System

Description

What It Does

The GAO Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management System is based RFID technology that enables the more effective and efficient inventory management of goods, such as new and used boats, boat engines, parts of other recreational vehicles, repair tools and devices. Inventory management is done simply by an employee holding a handheld PC such as a PDA, tablet, pistol grip handheld computer, or an EDA and walking through the recreational & boat dealers’ facility, dramatically improving accuracy and efficiency over conventional methods since it does not require the manual scanning of each item. Furthermore, each employee may keep an RFID Badge embedded with an RFID chip that serves as an Identification Card to enable keeping track of the employees’ activities through their movements.

Challenges/Issues

Many problems could occur when recreational and boat dealers rely on the traditional inventory management systems, as most of them are based on barcode technologies or manually operated. In these systems, a barcode number must be pre-printed on a sticker, then manually placed on each part of the boats and recreational vehicles. Some of these products are heavy, so if the stickers get damaged or dirty during the process of transporting them from stock to customers, the barcode scanner could misread or even fail to read the barcode. Furthermore, barcodes require a direct line of sight and a close distance to be read. It requires more time for the dealers to move around different workstations to identify each recreational and boat item visually and repeatedly that causes mistakes, extra labor costs and inefficient process.

How It Works

To address these issues, GAO has developed the GAO Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management System based on the latest UHF Gen 2 RFID technology. It consists of:

(1) One or multiple handheld PCs, such as tablet PCs, PDAs (personal digital assistant), EDAs (enterprise digital assistant) or pistol grip intelligent terminals
(2) An RFID object tag for each recreational and boat product
(3) An RFID location tag for each shelf or area where the product is located

The handheld PC is preinstalled with both an RFID reader and the GAO Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management Software. It also normally has built-in Wi-Fi capability to communicate with a server via a local Wi-Fi network for data transferring, an optional barcode scanner and a high-definition camera.

An RFID object tag is attached to each recreational and boat product for its identification. A suitable tag can be chosen from GAO’s wide selection of tags to fit the specific properties of the products. There are RFID location tags for all surface types including steel, strong and lightweight metals like aluminum, composites such as fiberglass and even more specific super-strong plastic-like Kevlar. An employee can then walk through the aisles of recreational and boat storehouses with the handheld PC in their hand, automatically taking the inventory by walking within range of the storehouses. The RFID reader has a further range than a conventional barcode scanner, automatically tracking the location and inventory of each item simply by walking within the range. Therefore, no manual scanning of each item is needed. This dramatically improves accuracy and efficiency over conventional methods and reduces damage as the products do not need to be handled by the employee to scan them.

Features

• No system installation is required since tags are simply placed on recreational and boat items and shelves or something indicating locations, and each handheld PC has been preinstalled with an RFID reader and GAO Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management Software.

• GAO Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management System utilizes RFID technology and dramatically improves productivity and accuracy. It has addressed the issues of the barcode-based conventional systems such as a line of sight requirement and reading errors due to barcode damage.

• Suitable for recreational and boat items of all types

Technical Specifications

• One or multiple handheld PCs from GAO, which will be preinstalled with a UHF Gen 2 RFID reader and GAO Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management Software
• A UHF RFID object tag for each recreational and boat product
• UHF RFID location tags indicating which shelf or area a product is located

Applications

GAO Recreational & Boat Dealers Inventory Management System can be effectively used to manage inventories of all kinds of recreational vehicles and boat items, such as boats, accompanying motors, trailers, engines and replacement parts.