GE-Aviation Moves Tote-Tracking Pilot to Production

Often, however, a less-than-full shipment made it onto a single truckload, and because the manifest Durham received with the truck reflected what was prepared for shipment rather than what was actually shipped, the record was often incorrect. To determine what was actually shipped, Keisler says, personnel in Durham spent a good deal of time running around with clipboards, inspecting each pallet. Using RFID has all but eliminated this manual process, and is currently saving Durham personnel precious time previously spent receiving the kits and bringing them into the production process.

Workers at the Erlanger warehouse now apply bar-coded RFID labels to the totes. Each label has an embedded passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID inlay compliant with the EPC Gen 2 and ISO 18000-6C standards, which comes pre-encoded with a unique ID number. An RFID printer-encoder captures this unique ID, then prints the label with a bar code containing a license-plate number generated by the warehouse management system (WMS). The license plate and tag ID numbers are then associated with each other in the WMS. GE-Aviation still uses the license plate numbers because they are utilized for other shipping and production functions.

Two to four totes fit on each pallet, depending on a particular tote's size. Before placing each tote on a pallet, workers apply a printed RFID label to it and use a handheld scanner to collect the license plate number from the label's bar code. Then, as each pallet is loaded onto the truck, it passes through an RFID reader portal, which collects the unique ID from each RFID tag. Once the truck is full, the WMS generates an electronic shipment manifest based on all RFID reads collected from the portal readers. It can also report which totes have been labeled, based on the bar-code scans collected, but not loaded onto the truck. These totes will then appear, correctly, on the manifest of the truck in which they are later loaded.

In Durham, the pallets are moved though an RFID reader portal as they are unloaded from the truck. The WMS then compares the tag IDs collected from the readers with the electronic shipment manifest, to confirm the accuracy of the shipment.

Placing the labels on the plastic tote, Keisler says, offers enough of a buffer between the inlay and the metallic content of the kits within the tote to eliminate most RF interference. The portal reader in Erlanger captures more than 95 percent of the tags, he adds, based on comparing the shipment manifest generated by the WMS with successful tag reads.