Exponent Technology Services, a UAE-based new-age technology services company, has developed an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based solution for inventory management challenges faced by organisations.

The solution merges the capabilities of both radio frequency identification (RFID) and UAVs, also commonly referred to as drones, said a statement.

The solution has the potential to support the UAE traders to cut their annual operational costs and thereby help them save millions of dollars, it said.

It will address the challenge many steel traders and distributors in the UAE face, resulting in higher operational costs. It was developed over an exhaustive period of research and testing.

Age Steel, a top Middle East premier steel trader operating multiple yards across Dubai, wanted to stream-line their inventory tracking process, as the quantity of stock it receives daily has been growing steadily. It required an autonomous method of tracking steel stocks that took into account, not only its position in space and time, but also the characteristics of the products themselves.  

Raed Siddiqui, Age Steel’s director of Operations, said: “We are continuously striving to improve our internal processes and to employ technology in ways that improve our bottom line. Our challenge was to locate inventory faster and more accurately, reducing the time spent in processing orders. We also wanted a system that relied less on human input and one that could automate as much of the inventory tracking process as possible.  

“Exponent helped realise this goal by automating a large fraction of our inventory counting process while minimiing the extent of change that we had to adopt.  The end result has been a minimally intrusive system that has improved the accuracy and timeliness of our inventory data by several orders of magnitude.”

Asam Khan, Exponent’s chief operating officer, said: “We studied Age Steel’s inventory process and explored multiple identification strategies which ranged widely on the scale of technological sophistication. Human readable labelling, bar-coding and RFID were all considered, but it emerged that uniquely identifying the bundle was not the problem, but locating it accurately within a large open yard that sees tens of thousands of tons of steel product shipped in, internally moved and shipped out monthly.

“More specifically Age Steel, wanted their physical and system inventories to match within a 10% variance during any 24 hour period and the location of any particular bundle to be identified within 10-sq-ms across a one-half million square foot facility. Safety was of paramount importance and was instrumental in Exponent developing UAV flight protocols that would minimise risk to both life and property.”  

To address this challenge, a proprietary application developed by Exponent accumulated RFID tag signal data via an RFID reader mounted on their customized UAV. This would then be transmitted in flight, in real-time, back to their bespoke inventory management system using a GPRS connection.  The inventory system then processes the RFID data and accurately determines the location of the individual bundles to within two-sq-m 98.2 per cent of the time.

These locations are then updated by Exponent’s inventory system and graphically available on a map overlay to Age Steel Yard managers, as well as to Age Steel’s off-site offices, through Exponent’s cloud-based platform, providing inventory accuracy.   - TradeArabia News Service