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Logwin Rolls Ahead With RFID
Foremen check production quality as workers assemble wheels. If the wheels were assembled correctly, a Logwin employee applies an adhesive RFID label onto each tire. The wheels are then loaded on pallets and moved past a pair of towers, each fitted with two RFID interrogators that read the tires' tags. The towers—containing two Motorola readers mounted on a tall metal frame—flank either side of an automated conveyor. If the interrogators recognize that all wheels associated with a particular batch are present, then the warehouse-management system assigns a spot for the pallet to be stored, and the conveyor belt moves the pallet of wheels to a storage area.
When a customer places an order, Logwin's employees pick the requested wheels and pack them in stacks of 10 on pallets to be shipped out. The company uses RFID to double-check that the correct articles were picked. The pallet is then moved to a stretch-wrap machine, where another pair of towers—each fitted with four Motorola interrogators—reads the wheels' RFID labels. As pallets are turned and tires are covered with plastic, the readers confirm that the wheels were picked correctly. If the picked products do not match the customer's order, the packing machine shuts down.
The advantages of the system, Peschek says, are its robustness for the industrial environment, the fact that rubber dust does not keep RFID tags from being read, and the time and labor saved, since workers no longer have to turn heavy wheels looking for bar-coded labels. The system also ensures that customers' products are not mixed up, and requires little or no training for use by seasonal workers.
Logwin produces roughly 160,000 to 170,000 RFID labels each year, using an RFID printer-encoder manufactured by Zebra Technologies.
"As a service provider, we decided to implement such a solution even though the requirement was not coming from the industry, or from our customers," Peschek says. "I think this is what gives courage to other service providers to start using RFID." The technology, he explains, "improves a simple process and generates value by reducing handling work and expanding capacity."
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| Michael Peschek, Logwin's director of operations |
The advantages of the system, Peschek says, are its robustness for the industrial environment, the fact that rubber dust does not keep RFID tags from being read, and the time and labor saved, since workers no longer have to turn heavy wheels looking for bar-coded labels. The system also ensures that customers' products are not mixed up, and requires little or no training for use by seasonal workers.
"As a service provider, we decided to implement such a solution even though the requirement was not coming from the industry, or from our customers," Peschek says. "I think this is what gives courage to other service providers to start using RFID." The technology, he explains, "improves a simple process and generates value by reducing handling work and expanding capacity."
