RFID Gains Traction at John Deere

Assuming John Deere is able to read the tags consistently and accurately, the pilot is expected to run for about a month. "Then we will look to more broadly roll it out," Moran says. The 300 totes involved in the trial represent approximately one-tenth of that factory's tote population.

The third RFID implementation is being installed in a new manufacturing line for a new product. Central to this implementation is its integration with John Deere's MES, which provides line operators the specific instructions required at each step of the manufacturing process. Mount-on-metal EPC Gen 2 tags, encoded with unique ID numbers representing product serial numbers, will be affixed to each product. RFID interrogators positioned throughout the assembly line will read the tags, and middleware will pass the tag data on to the MES.

"From that scan, the MES will know which product has come to that manufacturing station, so the MES will know what instructions to give," Moran explains. The integration of MES and RFID will obviate the manual bar-code scanning process that would have had to be in place had John Deere implemented a bar-code system to trigger the MES' instructions. Building this product would have involved 50 to 60 bar-code scans (one at every station in the assembly process, each taking 6 to 8 seconds). Not only do RFID reads take milliseconds, the use of RFID eliminated many of the scans required with bar coding. "You save a few seconds a whole bunch of times," Moran states, "and that starts to amount to a lot of savings."

These RFID implementations—tracking outbound logistics, monitoring WIP and streamlining the MES process—are only three of about a dozen passive UHF RFID projects John Deere has conducted this year. One of its earliest RFID projects, back in 2005, paved the way for the others: The manufacturer began implementing a UHF passive RFID system in July of that year, to help it track engine parts placed in reusable plastic totes and sent from a facility in Fargo, N.D., to an engine assembly plant in Waterloo, Iowa. With RFID, John Deere was able to track parts automatically by reading the unique IDs encoded to the reusable passive RFID tags attached to the totes as they moved through portal readers in the shipping and receiving docks at both facilities.

The RFID system also tracked the totes as they were unloaded at the Waterloo site and sent to a third party for cleaning before being returned to Fargo. The totes were sometimes misplaced, and the company had to purchase new totes as a result, even if there had been no increase in production to merit the purchase. By reading the RFID tags attached to the totes as they left the Waterloo assembly plant, John Deere was able to determine which totes were in the cleaning cycle and bound for the cleaning facility. That pilot is no longer in operation, but Moran says the company leveraged the experience, and is even reusing some of the RFID readers used in it.