Five Key business processes that RFID can support for orthopedic distributors

For medical device industry, the short term consigned inventory model is frequently used to support scheduled surgeries. Surgical cases are scheduled by field service and sales representatives and inventory items are shipped out for these scheduled cases. Some of these items are used and a majority of them are returned. Inventory replenishment, inventory tracking and order fulfillment require hours of labor to support these different processes for medical device distributors.

It is easy to get carried away by the merits of Auto ID Technologies like RFID and barcodes. However, it is important to keep focused on key business processes and not technology to identify the benefits that can be realized for these manual, expensive and critical processes. It is only in the context of the operational issues that a clear choice can emerge for the selection of the right technology as discussed in the recently published Raftar Equipment white paper.


Automatic data capture solutions becomes truly compelling for serializing and tracking every item across the relevant business processes and associated volumes to discover the true operational productivity which requires solution components like software and equipment. The RFID business case from one major Medical Device Manufacturer (MDM) realizes that item-level counting really counts when you’re talking about almost 19 million inventory items moving through multiple business processes – and back again.