Peg Pérego USA Tags Toys

By Claire Swedberg

Aug. 24, 2006—Peg Pérego USA, a Fort Wayne, Ind., manufacturer of toys and other children's products, will begin implementing an RFID system at the end of October. This new system will automatically tag individual boxes of toy riding vehicles as they are produced in its factory. Eventually, Pérego plans to extend the system to receive automatically the parts it uses to make those vehicles.

The first phase of the RFID installation, overseen by RFID systems integrator Northern Apex-RFID, will take place this fall at one of the company's four assembly lines. By the end of October, says Ken Maxwell, Pérego’s vice president of marketing, all finished items traveling down the conveyor will be boxed, labeled with an RFID tag and sent through a series of readers (interrogators). This will help the company track when the items were manufactured, as well as where they are within the facility's warehouse prior to shipping.

Matt Foreman

According to Maxwell, Pérego can manufacture up to 5,000 items in one day. The company, he says, hopes to determine the effectiveness of the system, especially in ensuring a high read rate, before expanding the RFID deployment to its three other conveyors, as well as back to the company's suppliers. As an added bonus, retailers that have deployed RFID interrogators and software would also benefit by being able to use each product's RFID tag to track inventory at their own distribution centers, back rooms, shelves and point-of-sale terminals.

Pérego will use an RFID label applicator to encode and apply an RFID label automatically to the box of each toy as it passes down the assembly line's conveyor. An RFID interrogator installed at the end of the line will capture the unique number of the applied RFID tag. The boxes will then be palletized prior to being moved to a warehouse near the production building.

Pérego has not yet decided whether to tag pallets, Maxwell says, though the company is considering that option A reader at the door of the production building will capture the RFID numbers of item tags as the pallets leave the factory. RFID readers installed at the entrance to the warehouse will read the tags, and the items will remain on the pallets until an order from a retailer arrives at the warehouse. To fill an order, workers will pull the items off the pallets and put them on another conveyor to bring them to the truck for loading.