Do you know where your carts are? Don’t play hide and seek with your missing carts! Due to damages or thefts, many carts from greenhouses and nurseries are lost. With the loss of each cart in the range of hundreds of dollars, this may snowball and costing companies’ tens of thousands in annual losses. Missing carts also result in missing opportunities that generates loss of revenue.
A cart tracking solution can use RFID and GPS technology to identify where your carts are located even while it is in transit. Furthermore, it gives you the visibility to see how long the cart have been there which allows you to effortlessly manage your cart inventory, improve logistical efficiency, increase delivery accuracy, prevent loss, and ultimately save you money. Big companies and facilities don’t have time to track down missing carts all over the country. Using RFID and GPS cart tracking abilities allows companies to eliminate wandering carts.
What are the Key Benefits of a Cart Tracking Solution?
- Visibility – View the locations of all your carts, to know where they are last or loaded onto a truck.
- Accuracy – Account for the amount of carts going in and out to predict how many carts is needed to go out and picked up for each order.
- Speed – Track carts faster and allocate them to where they are needed.
- Productivity – Save time spent looking for missing carts.
What is Cart Tracking?
Lost carts leads to lower efficiency, downtime, and loss in revenue. Having the right cart tracking solution in place can save you time and money. Cart tracking allows businesses to track all their carts and eliminate wandering carts with the power of GPS and RFID. Readers inside the facilities can automatically scan incoming and outgoing carts, registering them in the system, and attach a record of the GPS location to know where they were last.
Each cart will have an RFID tag, when the tag on the cart is read by the integrated reader, the system knows that it has left the warehouse or been loaded onto a truck. When it leaves, it registers that it was left at this specific store or location at this specific time. Additional reads from an handheld RFID reader can even be read while in transit to ensure utmost accuracy. So now the company will know how many carts need to be picked up next time they come by with their latest delivery.
What Should you Address When Making a Cart Tracking System?
When putting together an effective cart tracking system there are a few key questions to answer:
- How many carts do you need to track?
- How many locations do you have?
- Are the carts already labeled?
- Do you need real- time updates or batch collection be used?
- What type of reporting will you need from the system?
- How many users will you have to access the tracking system?
What are the Components of a Cart Tracking System?
An effective cart tracking system consists of 4 components:
- Inventory or Assest Tracking Software – Software is the main component of the solution, it will determine what features, options, or data is available. It shows what kind of reporting is availiable and whether it supports batch or real-time updates.
- RFID Reader – to be attach to thresholds to read incoming or outgoing carts.
- RFID Tags – affixed to each cart to hold information and data.
- Handheld RFID Reader – to read RFID tags on the go to ensure accurate locations to pinpoint carts.
