Automatic Goods movement inside Enterprise Resource Planning System using iBeacon’s Proximity

Abstract

Sri Lanka as a country targets to generate more revenue from exports, all the apparel manufacturing facilities in Board of Investment’s Export Processing Zones have their responsibility to contribute towards this target. Those apparel manufacturing facilities run at their full capacity producing thousands of items for a shipment, maintaining its quality and other standards. Financial and Quality attributes of each and every item needs to track separately, and require lot of man power to do the non-value adding information recording activity. The data entry operators do a non-value adding activity in the context of an apparel manufacturing facility because they are not involved in a process which does not contribute to the value of the product. The wages and other benefits paid for them was considered as a non-value adding activity cost. The apparel manufacturing facilities apply lean manufacturing concepts in the total manufacturing process, and focuses to eliminate non-value adding cost. It was a critical requirement to find a way to convert those non-value adding activities in to value adding activities. Conversion of non-value adding activity cost in to value adding activity, meaning to involve the data entry operators in to another process which is to improve the apparel products. In order to achieve this target there should have possible solution to automate the non-value adding activity of this context, which is the data entry activity in to the Enterprise Resource Planning (E.R.P) System. iBeacon is a latest Bluetooth technology where we can use to automate, information gathering activity if it integrates with Enterprise Resource Planning Software which the manufacturing facilities runs on, via Android mobile application. This research is done to find a possible way to connect SAP Enterprise Resource Planning software with the iBeacon devices by using Android mobile application to automate information tracking when goods movement within the premises. The Android mobile application collects proximity information of iBeacon devices and update the SAP system based on the goods mapped with each iBeacon device, eliminating lot of manual data entry points in the information flow of the production facility, which have achieved all the objectives of this research.