RFID Helps Ringnes Track Beverage Shipping Containers

"We're also thinking about asset management," adds Kvande, who envisions placing RFID tags on the refrigeration units that his company provides to retailers for the cold storage of beverages. If employees need to move or service a refrigerator at a store, he says, they can simply employ a handheld reader to scan an RFID tag on the refrigerator, thereby creating an electronic record of which refrigerator has been delivered, removed or serviced. Currently, workers read serial numbers off the refrigerators, then manually write them down on paper.

In the meantime, Kvande says, the company expects to apply tags to additional containers. Although the Oslo facility has now tagged all 300 containers at its site, it hopes to RFID-enable two other distribution centers in Norway in the future.

In addition, Volkswagen is employing an RFID system designed and deployed by IBM to track 3,000 reusable containers. In this case, the carmaker is using the system at its Wolfsburg assembly plant to track metal boxes that store sunroofs as they arrive from the supplier. In large part, VW's workers have used paper records to manually manage the containers, as well as the inventory within them. However, containers often go missing, and the company has found it difficult to discover their absence in a timely matter. The auto manufacturer also wanted a way to improve visibility into its inventory as it assembled its vehicles. After choosing the system provided by IBM, similar to that currently being used by Ringnes, the company carried out a one-year pilot project, which concluded in late 2008.

Each container tag has a unique ID number linked, in the IBM WebSphere Premises software system, to information regarding the sunroofs contained within, as well as the date and location that the tag was read. In that way, Volkswagen tracks not only the containers, but also the sunroofs. After the containers are received and their tags scanned with a fixed reader, they are then moved to the company's warehouse. Later, says Christian Clauss, IBM's Zurich-based director of sensor network solutions, as the containers are brought to the assembly line, an employee with a handheld interrogator reads the container tags again, thereby indicating the items are about to be installed.

The empty containers are then read once more en route to the warehouse, and out the dock doors onto a truck, to be returned to the supplier.