Italian Stone Company Carves Out Savings With RFID

The individual slabs are stored in racks in the plant's stockyard. A specialized EPC Gen 2 tag, made by Confidex and designed for mounting onto metal surfaces, is attached to each rack. After the cut slabs are placed onto a rack, the employee collects the ID number of the rack's tag and associates it with the IDs from the slabs' tags. Then, when an employee needs to retrieve a specific slab later, he can simply call up its rack number, which is saved to the production software.

To perform semi-annual inventory of every block and slab in the entire stockyard, which is roughly 200,000 square meters in size, employees use the handheld reader to walk up and down each rack in the stockyard and collect the unique ID from each tag. Before using RFID, it took two Antolini employees two days to manually collect the ID numbers used to identify each piece of stone. Now, it takes one employee less than three hours to take inventory of all its blocks and slabs, which includes up to 30,000 large blocks and 100,000 finished (cut and polished) slabs, on average.

A specialized EPC Gen 2 tag, made by Confidex and designed for mounting onto metal surfaces, is attached to each rack to identify a slab’s storage location.

When fulfilling orders, Antolini also uses the RFID tags to find specific slabs in the stockyard. Workers know the rack location of each slab by referring to the inventory records in the stockyard management software. Once they find the rack, they use the handheld readers to collect the tag ID associated with the slab being purchased and automatically update the inventory records to show it is being retrieved to fulfill an order.

Antolini had earlier tested bar code and high-frequency RFID systems before settling on the passive UHF system, called StoneID, that it deployed. These other technologies did not provide the read distance or reliability that the UHF system provides, explains Paola Visentin, Softwork's marketing and communications manager. The passive HF tags it tested required that the employees get very close to each tag to read it, so performing inventory of the tagged slabs or locating them was not as easy as the company had hoped. And bar codes, while the cheapest auto-ID option, are difficult to reliability read in a dusty environment such as the plant.

Minera Norge, a Norwegian company that manufactures slate tiles, blocks and related products, is also using RFID, as well as GPS technology, to track its finished products, as well as the forklifts used to transport them (see Slate Maker Adopts System to Track Products, Even When Buried Under Snow).