The Investigation of Rfid

The main purpose of this project is to investigate whether it is a good idea for developing the RFID technology in Vanguard Shop to enhance their business and improve the problem of supply chain management. As Vanguard Shop is one of the biggest and famous supermarkets in Hong Kong and Mainland China, however, it is find that by using the bar code system in the supermarket, there are some problem which may led to the inconvenience to customer and profit may reduce as a result.

Nowadays, it is found that the Vanguard Supermarket uses the bar code system for identification and specify of each product and its price. Therefore, unlike RFID automated checkout, with using the bar code system, after customer finished choosing the product they needed, customer have to line up at the front of the cashier counter waiting for payment, and for which the cashier have to use the bar-code reader to scan every product for identifying each product's price, and then the database will calculate the total prices and finally generate the receipt to customer. However, it is find out that in many cases, the total amount is always wrongly calculated. For example, if a product is on discount, but the system did not update the price, it may due to fact that the wrongly calculated of the total amount. In addition, the process of waiting for payment is also considered as inconvenience to costumer; therefore, I would like to suggest the Vanguard supermarket can use the automatic product identification technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to improve the situation. With the support and use of RFID technology, it is considered as the benefits to the supply chain management, as RFID technology enables keep tracking of the shelf product, which it can reduce the turnover rate of the product. If supplier finds that some best-selling product is almost out of order, they can re-order the product immediately. Furthermore, RFID technology also support automated checkout, which customer can exit the supermarket immediately after they finish purchasing the product. Therefore, it is considered as beneficial to both supplier and customer with the RFID technology developed in Vanguard Shop.

To complete the research, questionnaire will be used to receive user's opinion and to find out their main concern of the new technology to be developed in the supermarket.