Manufacturing enterprises often encounter logistical problems during production such as uneven yard allocations, and the daily turnover of dozens of times in heavy-duty yards. In addition, under the principle of "first come, first served, plus overdue penalties", suppliers always arrive at the campuses in advance, and wait in line for goods to load and unload, crowding all throughout the campuses. The unpunctual material unloading leads to production suspensions, and the change to production plans that depends on manual scheduling cannot be easily rescheduled or adjusted. Besides setting strict requirements for production information security, the factory needs to deploy a LAN on its campus; to solve this difficult task, there needs to be a solution that is easy to roll out, fast to implement, and does not affect production.
Moreover, in terms of warehouse management, there are no network solutions for asset tracking and management, and the traditional passive RFID solution featuring recording by manual scanning causes high labor costs and frequent gaps in inspections. Furthermore, when warehoused raw materials are stocked, in production, in transit, or being delivered, the real-time data of the positions and the status of those materials is unavailable, resulting in high management costs and low operational efficiency.
In the process of developing a smart logistics solution, SF DHL clarified the functional and non-functional requirements for IoT platform technology. Functional requirements covered IoT gateway interconnectivity, IoT hub, data analysis, and other aspects. Non-functional requirements involved scalability, stability, compatibility, maintainability, and other dimensions.