An Activity based Costing Model for Evaluating Effectiveness of RFID Technology in Pallet Reverse Logistics System

摘要

Pallet management, which involves direct and reverse logistic models, is one of the most critical activity in supply chain management. Pallets are needed in order to ship products from the producers/distributors to the retailers. Performances of pallet management could be improved by an advance tracking system based on Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID). RFID systems could increase effectiveness in acquiring data about properties of any entity - such as each pallet - that can be physically easily tagged. In this paper, authors propose an effective model of activity-based costing (ABC) for evaluating RFID investments in pallet management. The purpose is to investigate how different organizational procedures in pallet management could affect total logistic costs aiming to evaluate information technology investment. Therefore, the ABC model proposed has been applied according to different operational scenarios - such as direct management, outsourcing and pallet pooling. Results obtained highlight how an RFID application is economically sustainable to reduce the overall cost of pallet management activities.