The automotive industry must often manage large inventories of products. These inventories often can include a wide variety of different vehicles. Vehicles are often produced at rates such as forty or sixty vehicles per hour. This produces a continuous stream of new vehicles exiting the assembly line. The storage of these vehicles requires large storage areas. Because of this, automotive plants commonly utilize large parking facilities within the manufacturing plant grounds for storing and sorting vehicles. Additionally, the large number of vehicles is handled by a constant flow of vehicles out of storage to counter the flow of vehicles into storage.
The constant flow of vehicles to and from storage can create difficulties in the management of the inventory. The shipment of the wrong vehicle can create costly and time intensive problems. One known solution to such problems has been to track the individual vehicle through the use of a database. Although the use of such databases allows a general accounting of the inventory stock, it often does not prevent the shipment of the incorrect vehicle. If an incorrect vehicle is loaded by mistake and shipped, not only will the solution involve undesirable cost to fix, but also the resulting inventory within the database will likely be incorrectly reported. This is clearly undesirable.
One known solution to prevent the shipping of incorrect products has been to store differing products in separate areas within the storage area. While this may reduce that shipment of incorrect products, it can also have undesirable consequences. The sorting of vehicles into separate storage areas can increase handling costs and may lead to inefficient use of available storage area. In addition, the rate of vehicles flowing off the production line makes such sorting difficult. Also, the build characteristics of consecutive vehicles coming of the line often varies to fit specific orders. This would further confuse storage sorting. As the percentages of each differing build characteristic fluctuates, differing sized storage areas can be required. In addition, the use of separate storage areas also can become undesirable when the number of different vehicles becomes large. As the number of different build characteristics increases, the cost to sort and store such vehicles can become prohibitive. The cost, manpower, and time required for rearranging the storage area to accommodate fluctuations and large numbers of differing vehicles can be undesirable.
In addition to the problem of shipping incorrect vehicles, the large inventories can create additional problems. One such problem arises when specific individual vehicles with a given build characteristic need to be located. If a batch of vehicles with a particular build characteristic is identified as needing repair or recall, the identification of such vehicles may be difficult, costly, and occasionally impossible. The batch may include different vehicles that may be located in different sections of the storage area. In other situations, the specific vehicles may simply include custom products that need to be identified. Even when the general area of the storage facility can be identified as the location of the specific vehicle (such as by tracing production time), finding the specific vehicle can be difficult and costly.
It would therefore be desirable to have a method of tracking inventory that provided a reliable and accurate way to track the exact contents of an automotive storage facility. In addition, it would be desirable for a method that would reduce the shipments of incorrect vehicles, handle the storage of a wide variety of differing vehicles, and would allow specific individual vehicles of vehicle sub-groups to be quickly and efficiently located.