Connecting RFID to ERP and Warehouse Systems

Agree on identifier ownership

Document how tag identifiers map to items, handling units, assets, and shipments. Identify the system that owns each relationship. Decide what happens when a reader observes an unknown identifier or the mapping has changed since a device last synchronized.

Define a business event

Repeated observations should not automatically create repeated transactions. Agree when a set of reads becomes a receipt, a count proposal, or a shipment check. Preserve task context, reading point, timestamps, and the evidence required to investigate a disputed event.

Design delivery and recovery

Specify authentication, acknowledgment, retry behavior, and duplicate protection against the actual destination interface. A failed request and an uncertain response are different cases. Build a reconciliation path so operators can determine whether an update was applied before retrying it.

Test more than the happy path

Use stale mappings, duplicate reads, partial receipts, connection loss, and destination errors in the integration test. Define who owns each exception and how it becomes visible. Name a connector only after its supported interface and configuration have been confirmed for the project.

Illustrative event mapping

A capture event might contain a task identifier, tag identifier, observation time, and reader or station identity. The application resolves the tag to a business record and evaluates it against the expected task. Only the approved result becomes a receipt, issue, or adjustment request. These are illustrative fields, not a specification for an existing Theia connector; the destination interface determines the required contract.

What happens after a timeout?

A timeout does not prove the destination rejected the request. It may have committed the transaction before the acknowledgement was lost. Agree on an idempotency or transaction key and a way to query status before retrying. Test repeated delivery and rejection explicitly. The operator should see whether work is pending, accepted, or awaiting correction, without needing to infer state from a spinner.

Own the correction path

Assign responsibility for mapping errors, business-rule rejections, and connectivity failures. Retain the original task context and the reason for any correction. Verify that a replay preserves the intended transaction identity and that only authorized users can change business outcomes.