Guarding the stock in a gold shop

[Nick]

Gold shops are now able to track their products, including gold ornaments and jewellery, in cases of loss or theft, thanks to a local software company's development of a radio-frequency identification (RFID) system.

The system has been developed by software firm Molecule (Thailand), with support from the Technology Management Centre's Industrial Technology Assistance Programme. It aims to solve the routine problem of losses through human error or cheating in gold shops.

Molecule (Thailand)'s managing director Somsit Duang-Ek-Anong said the system used RFID tags to identify each piece of gold.

Routine procedure at gold shops involves bringing trays filled with gold jewellery and ornaments from a safe at the start of a day's business. The trays are displayed in cabinets, and then returned to the safe at the close of business. During the day, staff remove various pieces to show to customers. There is a high possibility of loss or misplacement, and a lot of time is spent counting and inspecting stock at the end of each day to reconcile remaining stocks with the day's sales.

"All the work is manual, with the chance of a lot of human error. So, we developed the RFID system to turn this manual process of counting and inspecting the products in a gold shop into an electronic process," Somsit said.

The company's key developments have covered three areas: RFID tags and readers, a product database system, and a system covering safes.

The RFID tag takes the form of a price tag stuck on to each piece of jewellery or gold product. Each tag identifies the product and lists all its details, including the price.

"At first, we used barcodes. But gold products can be very small and the barcodes were often folded over, and that caused errors in identifying and counting the products," Somsit said. "Then we linked up with the Industrial Technology Assistance Programme, and together we developed an RFID system that works without barcodes."

As well as developing the new tags, Molecule also developed an RFID reader that is designed to read a lot of RFID tags at once, even when the tags overlie each other. This saves a lot of time spent in checking at the end of each day, as well as enabling each tray of gold to be checked immediately, whenever something is believed to be amiss.

"Instead of counting items manually, they just put a tray of gold products - which may hold 40 to 250 pieces - on to an RFID reader. It will count all the products and show a list of them, including their item numbers and details, on a computer screen in just a few seconds. The RFID reader can also read more than one tray at a time. This saves a lot of time for gold-shop staff in monitoring their products," Somsit said.

The cost of the system is about Bt100,000 per gold shop, and Somsit claims the shops are able to break even in just a short time because the system is able to almost totally prevent losses.

"The loss of only a few gold products may equal the cost of investment in our system," he said.

Molecule has also developed an access-authentication SMS command system to control access to the safe in which a gold shop keeps its stock.

Somsit said about 15 gold shops in Bangkok were already using its systems. They have reported increased efficiency and waste savings of about 10 per cent compared with a barcode system.

He said 15 customers were only a tiny fraction of the 6,000 gold shops throughout the country.

"We plan to expand this system and offer it to the whole supply chain of the gold and jewellery industry, as well as to pawn shops and antique dealers," he said.


ที่มา: nationmultimedia.com