Honda Italia Shifts Its RFID Deployment Into Second Gear

The system is set up to automatically calculate the time required to finish a production run, based on the times the active tags on the bikes were interrogated. Before Honda began employing RFID, managers had to call down to the production line to obtain an estimate of when a particular run would be finished, or else manually determine an estimate by hand.

At the end of the line, active tags are removed from the bike for reuse, and production information is stored. With the data collected from the active and passive tags, Honda Italia documents which individual motorcycle frames were built with which part lots.

"A customer can find out when his motorcycle was built," Coletta states, "and which parts were used to build it." The system also gives Honda Italia the ability to automate orders for parts, he adds, since it calculates the estimated time at which production runs will be completed.

Before the first Ariana project, Honda Italia utilized bar-coded labels to manually identify chassis. The company scanned the labels, then wrote down production information by hand.

Honda Italia uses and reuses approximately 3,000 passive and 300 active tags per year. It has tagged most containers with low-cost passive tags, but purchased only enough higher-priced active tags for daily production. As such, active tags are reused quickly after moving through the production line, and are removed from containers and bike frames.