Gerolsteiner Unbottles ROI From Its RFID Deployment

The driver then takes a pallet down from the warehouse shelf and moves it to the loading area. Once the forklift's bar-code scanner identifies the pallet and its interrogator reads the RFID tag in the ground at the dock door, that data is linked and sent via wireless LAN to Gerolsteiner's SAP system. The system is updated as to the exact pallet being shipped—and to which customer—thus fulfilling E.U. requirements.

Before the system was implemented, Gerolsteiner depended solely on bar codes to track pallets, but it lacked the ability to identify which batches were shipped to particular customers. To do that, Gerolsteiner would have had to hire dozens of people to scan bar codes manually.

A forklift driver receives a load order via a computer screen mounted on a particular delivery vehicle.

"We would have had €250,000 [$366,600] in salary expenses per year," Keul says. He estimates that the company spent about €1 million ($1.47 million) on the project, including costs for software updates and non-RFID related hardware such as bar-code scanners. Keul expects the company to receive a full return on this investment in two years, after the system has run for a total of four years.

Antennas for the 35 forklift RFID interrogators were developed and built by German technology solutions company Indyon. Gerolsteiner reports no problems getting workers to adapt to the new technology. The company says it trained a few key people, who then showed their colleagues how to run the system.