By Bob Violino

April 7, 2008—Columbus Brick Co. began business in northern Mississippi in 1890, making and selling clay bricks formed in wooden molds and hardened by blazing hot coals. Back then, the company's products were delivered to commercial and residential customers in surrounding areas by rail cars, steamboats and mules, with thousands of bricks unloaded by hand each day.

More than 100 years later, the Columbus, Miss., company is still in the business of making and selling bricks, shipping more than 140 million bricks per year throughout the Southeast and Midwest. But its methods of manufacturing products, delivering them to customers and keeping track of inventory and the location of goods in its yard have all changed. The latter process has been enhanced considerably by RFID technology.

Bricks for the construction industry, typically packaged in strapped loads of about 500 per cube, are transported to outdoor brickyards, where they're subject to inclement weather, dust and dirt.

Columbus Brick is using a turnkey system from Stark Solutions, a software developer and systems integrator located in Greenville, S.C., specifically designed for tracking brick and refractory products (materials designed to withstand high temperatures). The 2007 deployment of the RFID-based system, known as HackTrac, has led to several benefits, such as reduced load times for products, and the company expects to see considerable cost savings from more efficient use of equipment and labor resources in its brickyard.