Internet of Things (IoT) Impact on Inventory Management

Abstract

The impact of the internet of things (IoT) on inventory management is explored in this chapter. The chapter discusses comprehensively IoT system components, communication protocols, their architectures, and applications in various sectors. This chapter also investigates how IoT enabled inventory can provide real-time inventory management through timely monitoring, tracking, and optimization of inventories by employing RFID tags and readers. The RFID tags include encoded data in the form of unique IDs, which facilitates effective tracking and monitoring of goods and services pertaining to an organization. RFID readers can detect tags and transmit data encoded in it to the cloud for processing, thereby resulting in well informed data-driven decisions with improved operational efficiency. Furthermore, the chapter explores inventory management processes in the context of IoT-enabled inventories. The chapter also presents a comprehensive comparison of IoT enabled inventories with the traditional inventory management systems.