Brief introduction of the client
DISCORDIA was founded in 1992 in Varna. Its activities cover all aspects of transport, freight forwarding and logistics services on an international scale and its fleet is significant – almost 800 trucks.
Our standard product StoreIT – a warehouse management system – was used for the project. StoreIT-Truck is a system for managing and automating the inventory process of handing over the change of trucks and trailers, their inventories and storage locations of spare components.
Project Description
The project includes a WEB client and a mobile application that allows adding new trucks/trailers to the fleet, creating and printing labels, tracking inventory of trucks and trailers. In order to implement the inventory tagging of items with RFID tags is used and the actual stock detection is implemented with RFID readers on the mobile devices.
Each truck has equipment that includes a specific set of items. Each item is registered in the system and an RFID tag is generated for it, which is stuck on the item and associated to a specific truck or tractor to be uniquely tracked on each run.
An inventory is created from the WEB application, which can be a handover (driver to driver), a fuel stop, or a preparation to/from vehicle service. The employee taking the inventory passes the RFID reader and scans the entire truck. His system notes what is available and what is missing. Control photos are taken of the truck’s condition and photos are taken when a specific event occurs – for example, damage. These actions are performed in the parking lot where there is no Wi-Fi coverage, but when the device is returned to a location with internet, the data from the RFID reader is sent to the WEB client and all records are uploaded to a server where they can be accessed at any time.
The implementation
The StoreIT-Truck truck inventory system was implemented at the customer in late April 2021 and the benefits have already been significant. It saves DISCORDIA a lot of time and effort because, instead of a manual check, every piece of equipment in the vehicle is automatically detected. Thus, manual inventory times of over 1 hour are reduced to 5-10 minutes with StoreIT-Truck.
Development of the system
Future expansion of the capabilities of the system implemented at DISCORDIA with functionalities that are part of our standard warehouse management system – StoreIT is planned. For example, a module for defining and logging key performance indicators that are reported at user-defined intervals. These indicators are an indication of how processes are going at the customer – how long is the average duration of an inventory, what is the productivity of the people in the parking lot and much more. The values of these indicators can dynamically build so-called dashboards – set for different roles in the system and this allows management to track processes in a concise statistical form.