RFID-based wireless manufacturing for real-time management of job shop WIP inventories

Modern manufacturing shop-floors suffer from a bottleneck of capturing and collection of real-time field information. Paper-based manual systems are time-consuming, prone to errors, tedious, and frequently damaged, lost or misplaced. As a result, the information does not accurately and promptly reflect the real-life situations and changes of the situations due to disturbances. Without up-to-date information, it is impossible to make accurate shop-floor decisions. This paper presents an affordable approach to shop-floor performance improvement by using wireless manufacturing (WM)-an emerging advanced manufacturing technology (AMT). WM relies substantially on wireless devices such as RFID (radio frequency identification) or auto-ID sensors and wireless information networks for the collection and synchronization of the real-time field data from manufacturing workshops. Emphasis is placed upon how to deploy WM technology for managing work-in-progress (WIP) inventories in manufacturing job shops with typical functional layouts. This approach avoids the change from functional to cellular layouts in order to retain existing operational flexibility while improving efficiency and capacity. Representative WIP logistic processes will be used to demonstrate how production and logistic operators and their supervisors accomplish their tasks in a WM shop-floor.