Case Study: Lexar Media Leverages The Power Of Mobile RFID To Streamline Manufacturing And Warehouse Operations

Lexar Media was seeking a technology solution that would resolve two major business issues:

• Strengthen collaboration across the supply chain to provide the information needed to enable more timely and better informed decision making
• Improve the accuracy and efficiency of warehouse operations

The solution needed to eliminate the high volume of shipping errors — customers were receiving orders with missing product, or product that belonged to another customer. These shipping errors came at a high price — dissatisfied high-profile customers as well as the high direct and indirect costs of the mis-ship, which involved return shipping, re-stocking costs and the costs to process the order a second time. And the solution also needed to offer maximum scalability to accommodate the company's extremely large volumes — over two million packages of products representing 30 million individual units are shipped each year to Wal-Mart alone.

Lexar Media had already volunteered to become one of Wal-Mart's early RFID adopters. But in place of simple slap-and-ship compliance, the company sought an enterprise-wide solution that would enable real-time order management, optimization of logistics operations and real-time monitoring of all distribution center operations to improve overall business agility — and customer response times.