Glass Fabricator Increases Visibility With RFID

Viracon looked into an RFID solution for about a year, says Matt Miesner, the company's process-improvement project leader, and found that passive RFID tags would not operate as well as active RFID tags in its environment. Therefore, in the third quarter of 2007, Viracon began piloting AeroScout's Wi-Fi-based 2.4 GHz RFID system. The company installed about 80 Cisco Wi-Fi access points throughout one of the three buildings on campus, and also attached AeroScout T2EB Industrial Tags to 500 metal carriers. The tags, powered by a battery with an eight-year life span, offer a read range of 450 feet.

If a carrier is standing still, its tag transmits its ID number only about once every half hour. Once the cart moves, however, a motion sensor in the tag instructs that tag to beacon every few seconds while the cart is in motion. Cisco appliance software allows the access points to pinpoint a tag's location within about 15 feet. That data is stored on Viracon's inventory-management database and used by AeroScout's MobileView software to enable workers to locate a specific carrier by displaying an icon on a map of the assembly floor on their PC screen.

Amir Ben-Assa, AeroScout's industry solutions marketing director, says the pilot was successful and led to full deployment at all three buildings on Viracon's Owatonna campus, which began at the end of 2007. According to Ben-Assa, the company found that search time, per carrier, was reduced from an average of 15 to 30 minutes to less than one minute. "The goal was to automate the process, reduce search time and eliminate lost carriers," he says, "and all those goals were met."

The greatest challenge for the installation, Ben-Assa says, was the possibility of RF interference due to the presence of metals and high ceilings, but the use of Wi-Fi active tags and access points made it possible to transmit signals effectively in such an environment. With the deployment—which was completed this month at the Owatonna facility—Viracon is using about 5,000 AeroScout Wi-Fi-based active RFID tags mounted on the carriers.

Miesner says the company has completed a cost/benefit analysis and determined how much the system will reduce search time, as well as increase the throughput and reduction of scrapping glass. He expects the quantity of searches to be reduced from 40 percent of carriers to less than 1 percent, and says the company anticipates reducing reorders due to missing carriers by 50 to 70 percent. "We anticipate an ROI in about a year," Miesner says.