RFID Drives Up Efficiencies at ABB

The smallest drives that ABB manufactures weigh about 15 kilograms (33 pounds) and are shipped in boxes, while the largest drives weigh up to 400 kilograms (882 pounds) and are transported on pallets. As soon as a drive is manufactured, it is placed in a box or on a pallet, and a worker applies a printed adhesive label containing an EPC Gen 2 UHF inlay to that pallet or box. The drives are then loaded on trucks or trailers for short-term storage or immediate forwarding. RFID tags are interrogated as the goods are moved past fixed gate readers in the loading area near the dock doors. Information about specific goods is linked in the database to the ID number of the truck or trailer, which is entered manually so that ABB knows the loading progress of each vehicle, and has an exact description of the goods it contains.

The system produces a warning error at the gate if a worker attempts to load the wrong products onto a vehicle, and it also notifies employees when a truck's consignment is incomplete. What's more, by outsourcing some of its logistics and warehousing to a partner, ABB was able to free up space at its factory to expand its production capacity.

UPM Raflatac is supplying the tags for the implementation. Vilant Systems, which served as the systems integrator for ABB's RFID deployment, provided the readers, which have a range of 3 meters (10 feet).

Later, ABB hopes its logistics partners will utilize the RFID tags on the pallets and boxes as well, in order to provide it with additional information regarding the status of goods, as well as improve its own services. The company plans to introduce item-level tracking for the components that make up the drives; a large drive may comprise thousands of parts.

In a separate application, ABB has been using RFID in a kanban process involving reusable plywood boxes since December 2005. Both the supplier and ABB read the boxes' RFID tags. When a full box leaves the supplier, its tag is read and an electronic notice is created in SAP. Once an empty box leaves ABB's factory, it triggers a material order from the supplier.

According to ABB, the system has decreased the manpower the company requires to process incoming packages. It has also reduced errors compared with the bar-code system previously used, the firm reports, and provided a return on investment within a few months. In December of this year, ABB plans to implement the same system at a factory in Estonia.