By Samuel Greengard

Jan. 15, 2007—Balancing tradition and innovation is essential for Wells' Dairy, the nation's largest family-owned dairy-products manufacturer. While the LeMars, Iowa, company strives to maintain high-quality standards for its ice cream and other dairy products, it also needs to leverage information technology to cope with pricing pressures in the intensely competitive dairy industry.

Thus, when Wal-Mart mandated that its top 100 suppliers adopt radio frequency identification in its supply chain by January 2005, Wells' Dairy—which falls into that category—recognized that by extending the technology beyond the tagging of cases and pallets, the 93-year-old company could improve inventory management, boost quality control and gain greater insights into its production and supply-chain practices. "We developed a business case, and it demonstrated that RFID offers significant benefits," says Brad Galles, Wells' process-controls and electrical-engineering manager.



Wells' Dairy built a tagging system for cases and pallets of ice cream to comply with the Wal-Mart mandate. But instead of stopping there, the supplier turned to Rockwell Automation to develop an RFID solution that could pull data from its production-line control system and provide information about the specific location of a case or pallet within its facilities. "It offers a window into our production process," Galles explains.