My problem here is that the shelf life of most electronics I have dealt with was something like 5 to 7 years. If you are warehousing parts that long, why? Repair and replacement parts?
Wes is right - there are many ways to tag items. I know where shelf life is critical, as with some paints, certain adhesives and such, I have seen companies keep special storage areas for those items alone with a list much like a calibration recall list. Product comes in, is tagged and put on the list. The list is reviewed at a period appropriate to the criticallity.
I have seen where companies had good FIFO systems and this, while an issue, was never addressed per se. The situation was looked at, and it was easy to prove that the material was always used well before shelf life was reached. This was in QS-9000 situations. One instance was an adhesive with a 3 month shelf life. Their FIFO system was robust so no special treatment was given to the material. Records were availale which showed that material was always used within 30 days - usually within 15 days. Thus, there was no viable cause to have a specific system to address shelf life for that material.
Considering Wes's post, the ideal situation would be one where each item would be labeled with a transponder label on receipt and that individual transponder label would be keyed with an expiration date at which point it would 'turn on' when queried by an RF signal and notify a database (or other appropriate software - an e-mail could be sent, for example) that the material was, or was close to, expiring. That in turn would trigger an alert to the warehouse supervisor. Typically these transponder labels are 'passive' - they are queried by an RF signal, which technically powers them and turns them on - and they return a reply - so, no batteries or other power source is necessary. This type of tagging has, in fact, been used in many industries for well over 10 years - Probably longer. In addition, several antennas can be used in a warehouse to query the tags daily or more frequently so you don't even need a person.
You can get as elaborate as you want. There were a couple of really good guys at Motorola Phoenix who set up a system for document control. When someone submitted a request for change via the intranet or the internet, their beepers went off and the request for change could be read (paged through) over their pagers. Over kill? I thought so but technology wise it was really impressive. They had one heck of a system. Those were two smart, motivated fellas.
