Tutorial: Deploy and walk through the smart inventory management application template

Inventory is the stock of goods a retailer holds. Inventory management is critical to ensure the right product is in the right place at the right time. A retailer must balance the costs of storing too much inventory against the costs of not having sufficient items in stock to meet demand.

IoT data generated from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, beacons, and cameras provide opportunities to improve inventory management processes. You can combine telemetry gathered from IoT sensors and devices with other data sources such as weather and traffic information in cloud-based business intelligence systems.

The benefits of smart inventory management include:

• Reducing the risk of items being out of stock and ensuring the desired customer service level.
• In-depth analysis and insights into inventory accuracy in near real time.
• Tools to help decide on the right amount of inventory to hold to meet customer orders.

This application template focuses on device connectivity, and the configuration and management of RFID and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) reader devices.

RFID tags (1)

RFID tags transmit data about an item through radio waves. RFID tags typically don't have a battery unless specified. Tags receive energy from the radio waves generated by the reader and transmit a signal back toward the RFID reader.

BLE tags (1)

Energy beacon broadcasts packets of data at regular intervals. Beacon data is detected by BLE readers or installed services on smartphones and then transmitting that to the cloud.

RFID and BLE readers (1)

RFID reader converts the radio waves to a more usable form of data. Information collected from the tags is then stored in local edge server or sent to cloud using JSON-RPC 2.0 over MQTT. BLE reader also known as Access Points (AP) are similar to RFID reader. It's used to detect nearby Bluetooth signals and relay its message to local Azure IoT Edge or cloud using JSON-RPC 2.0 over MQTT. Many readers are capable of reading RFID and beacon signals, and providing additional sensor capability related to temperature, humidity, accelerometer, and gyroscope.

Azure IoT Edge gateway (2)

Azure IoT Edge server provides a place to preprocess that data locally before sending it on to the cloud. We can also deploy cloud workloads artificial intelligence, Azure and third-party services, business logic using standard containers.

Device management with IoT Central

Azure IoT Central is a solution development platform that simplifies IoT device connectivity, configuration, and management. The platform significantly reduces the burden and costs of IoT device management, operations, and related developments. Customers and partners can build an end-to-end enterprise solutions to achieve a digital feedback loop in inventory management.

Business insights and actions using data egress (3)

IoT Central platform provides rich extensibility options through Continuous Data Export (CDE) and APIs. Business insights based on telemetry data processing or raw telemetry are typically exported to a preferred line-of-business application. It can be achieved using webhook, service bus, event hub, or blob storage to build, train, and deploy machine learning models and further enrich insights.

In this tutorial, you learn how to,

• create smart inventory management application
• walk through the application

Prerequisites

• No specific pre-requisites required to deploy this app.
• Recommended to have Azure subscription, but you can even try without it.

Create smart inventory management application

Create the application using the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Azure IoT Central Build site. Then sign in with a Microsoft personal, work, or school account. Select Build from the left-hand navigation bar and then select the Retail tab:

   

2. Select Create app under smart inventory management.

To learn more, see Create an IoT Central application.

Walk through the application

The following sections walk you through the key features of the application:

Dashboard

After successfully deploying the application template, your default dashboard is a smart inventory management operator focused portal. Northwind Trader is a fictitious smart inventory provider managing warehouse with Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and retail store with Radio-frequency identification (RFID). In this dashboard, you'll see two different gateways providing telemetry about inventory along with associated commands, jobs, and actions that you can perform. This dashboard is pre-configured to showcase the critical smart inventory management device operations activity. The dashboard is logically divided between two different gateway device management operations:

• The warehouse is deployed with a fixed BLE gateway and BLE tags on pallets to track and trace inventory at a larger facility.

• Retail store is implemented with a fixed RFID gateway and RFID tags at individual an item level to track and trace the stock in a store outlet.

• View the gateway location, status and related details.

  

• You can easily track the total number of gateways, active, and unknown tags.

• You can perform device management operations such as update firmware, disable sensor, enable sensor, update sensor threshold, update telemetry intervals and update device service contracts.

• Gateway devices can perform on-demand inventory management with a complete or incremental scan.

  

Device Template

Click on the Device templates tab, and you'll see the gateway capability model. A capability model is structured around two different interfaces Gateway Telemetry and Property and Gateway Commands

Gateway Telemetry and Property - This interface represents all the telemetry related to sensors, location, device info, and device twin property capability such as gateway thresholds and update intervals.

Gateway Commands - This interface organizes all the gateway command capabilities

Rules

Select the rules tab to see two different rules that exist in this application template. These rules are configured to email notifications to the operators for further investigations.

Gateway offline: This rule will trigger if the gateway doesn't report to the cloud for a prolonged period. Gateway could be unresponsive because of low battery mode, loss of connectivity, device health.

Unknown tags: It's critical to track every RFID and BLE tags associated with an asset. If the gateway is detecting too many unknown tags, it's an indication of synchronization challenges with tag sourcing applications.

Clean up resources

If you're not going to continue to use this application, delete the application template by visiting Application > Management and click Delete.

Next steps

Learn more about :

IoT Central data integration