In the past few years, the supply chain industry has been keen in adopting technologies that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to enhance inventory management. RFID technology has shown strengths in resistance to harsh environment, storing information, reading batches, and ability to get information wirelessly and process it accordingly.
As a result, the industry has been developing RFID based inventory management system to address the existing challenges. Subsequently, implementation of RFID solution is a significate contributor to a lean production since it eliminates waste in the production process.
This is a result of the technology’s ability to reduce costs of inventory management, minimize logistics time, and lowering overall wastes. In other words, utilization of RFID technology enhances the efficiency of material inventory compared to the traditional methods.

Pipe Yards
Inspection Department, UAV and Robotics Team, has partnered with IT Logistics Group and Supply Chain Policy & Systems Department to improve Saudi Aramco pipe yard inventory management system by adopting UAV-based Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology as a solution. The partnership objective was to develop and deploy RFID solution to enable pipe yards to conduct effective material inventory. The UAV solution resolved the limited mobility of the conventional ground inventory practices due to limited aisles accessorily.

UAV-Based RFID Solution
To overcome the mobility challenges in the pipe yard, UAV was the latest and most capable mobility solution. The combination of the advanced UAV platform with a complete RFID solution payload resulted in introduction of an intelligent solution that changed the way inventory management is done in the pipe yards.

https://www.saudiaramco.com/

• Saudi Arabia

Enhancement in inventory management in the company pipe yards is expected to result in large cost avoidance estimated to be $30MM. By adopting the UAV-Based RFID technologies in the field the result was an accurate system that was able to identify count, and locate over 4000 pipes in less than four (4) minutes.