One RFID Tag From Cradle to Grave
Consumer electronics manufacturers, distributors and retailers are working toward the day when life-cycle tracking of computers, TVs and other electronic products will deliver benefits for both businesses and consumers.
By Elizabeth Wasserman
Apr. 1, 2008—When Toshiba Europe started using radio frequency identification technology to track laptop computers at its plant in Regensburg, Germany, the company saw immediate results. Since 2006, the European subsidiary of Japan-based Toshiba has been applying passive RFID tags to the accessory boxes packed with each laptop on the production line, and reading the tags automatically as pallets are moved past RFID interrogators into the warehouse to await shipment to retailers. Previously, it took workers 90 seconds to hand-scan the bar code on each laptop on a pallet. With RFID, the time spent inventorying each pallet has been cut to three seconds.
By speeding up the process, RFID helped Toshiba Europe overcome a bottleneck at the plant and ultimately increase output from 9,500 to 17,300 laptops per day. The cost of scanning each pallet was reduced from 35 cents to 21 cents-saving Toshiba $470,000 last year alone. The RFID initiative also reduced loss and theft of products, and helped Toshiba ensure accuracy of shipments to its customers.
But the benefits of item-level tagging stop when the pallets leave the warehouse, says Andreas Unterbusch, Toshiba TEC's RFID project manager. While some European electronics retailers-such as Media Markt and Saturn, both owned by German retail giant Metro-want suppliers to RFID-tag goods, those retail chains are currently reading RFID tags only on cases and pallets. "Toshiba is prepared [for item-level tagging], and this could be used by anybody asking for that," Unterbusch says. "But nobody is asking for that at the moment."
Apr. 1, 2008—When Toshiba Europe started using radio frequency identification technology to track laptop computers at its plant in Regensburg, Germany, the company saw immediate results. Since 2006, the European subsidiary of Japan-based Toshiba has been applying passive RFID tags to the accessory boxes packed with each laptop on the production line, and reading the tags automatically as pallets are moved past RFID interrogators into the warehouse to await shipment to retailers. Previously, it took workers 90 seconds to hand-scan the bar code on each laptop on a pallet. With RFID, the time spent inventorying each pallet has been cut to three seconds.
By speeding up the process, RFID helped Toshiba Europe overcome a bottleneck at the plant and ultimately increase output from 9,500 to 17,300 laptops per day. The cost of scanning each pallet was reduced from 35 cents to 21 cents-saving Toshiba $470,000 last year alone. The RFID initiative also reduced loss and theft of products, and helped Toshiba ensure accuracy of shipments to its customers.
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But the benefits of item-level tagging stop when the pallets leave the warehouse, says Andreas Unterbusch, Toshiba TEC's RFID project manager. While some European electronics retailers-such as Media Markt and Saturn, both owned by German retail giant Metro-want suppliers to RFID-tag goods, those retail chains are currently reading RFID tags only on cases and pallets. "Toshiba is prepared [for item-level tagging], and this could be used by anybody asking for that," Unterbusch says. "But nobody is asking for that at the moment."
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