Abstract
Mold design and manufacturing plays a crucial role in the development cycle for high-volume mold-injection, pressed, or formed products. For economical reasons mold manufacturing outsourcing is become a popular strategy. However, the current practice of outsourcing task management's efficiency could be improved by introducing a progress tracking system. In this research, we propose an automatic progress tracking system platform for use when mold fabrication is outsourced to third parties. The system uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to transform the physical processes flow into information flow. The RFID messages are map to six types of events to track the progress status of a working piece. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the system architecture and implementation.