Oct 17, 2012Supermarket operator Supervalu is keeping a close eye on trailers at its Lancaster distribution center, via a radio frequency identification solution that tracks their locations without the use of any fixed readers. The company gathers its location data from passive RFID tags mounted on trailers and interrogators installed on yard trucks. Since its installation 18 months ago, the Yard Hound system, provided by PINC Solutions, has enabled the firm to reduce its fleet of trailers by approximately 70 vehicles, while also decreasing labor by 80 hours per week.
Supervalu, the third largest traditional food-retailing company within the United States, operates more than 2,500 stores, including Acme, Albertsons and Save-A-Lot, as well as serving as a distributor to other stores. At its 1.7-million-square-foot Lancaster facility—the largest of the company's 26 DCs—approximately 1,000 trailers loaded with goods arrive weekly. Supervalu owns 800 trailers (since reducing its fleet by 70) used on that site, while third-party logistics companies also bring trailers into and out of the yard.
Managing the trailers is a daunting task, the company reports. On a daily basis, many of the vehicles are moved from staging areas within the yard to dock doors in order to be unloaded, and are then returned to the designated areas in the yard. In addition, empty trailers are relocated when it is time to load them. Loaded trailers are moved to outbound-ready lines, and the trailers are also used to move product from one dock area to another.
Until recently, the company accomplished such tasks manually, by means of pen, paper and a mailbox, says Beth Kroutch, the general manager of Supervalu's Lancaster DC. When orders for moving full or empty trailers were placed, staff members at the warehouse office handwrote instructions, including the trailer's description and serial number, as well as its expected approximate location, and placed them within a mailbox mounted outside the warehouse. Yard workers, known as jockeys, would review the paperwork in the mailbox, decide which order to complete, and remove the paperwork specific to that order from the box.
That system worked, Kroutch says, but was slow—the staff had to carry paperwork around, hope that trailers were where the DC's managers expected them to be, and, at the end of the shift, provide written documentation of every step taken. Therefore, the company began seeking an automated solution, she says, adding, "There were lots of IT folks with opinions." The main criterion for determining the best choice, she says, was to find an affordable system that would be user-friendly.
The Supervalu DC attached Omni-ID passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) Gen 2 RFID tags with Alien Technology Higgs3 chips to all of its trailers, and applies temporary tags with a magnetic backing to visiting trailers from third-party companies. As trailers arrive at the yard, the jockeys put them away in designated staging areas. From that point on, the trailers' locations are managed by the technology built onto the wagons passing the trailers many times daily.
Upon beginning a work shift, a yard wagon operator views his or her orders on the Yard Hound system displayed on a touch screen within that driver's cab, indicating not only which trailers need to be moved, but where they are located, based on an icon displayed on a yard map.
As the vehicle passes among trailers throughout the yard, the XR450 reader continually interrogates the ID number of each RFID tag attached to the trailers within range (approximately 30 feet), and a cellular radio onboard the wagon transmits that ID, along with the vehicle's GPS location, to the back-end software, which updates that trailer's location. In this way, if a trailer has been deposited in the yard and its specific location is not yet known, the system receives data from the wagon's on-board reader, and the software instantly updates the trailer's exact location.
In the event that the trailer is later moved, Kroutch says, another wagon equipped with an RFID reader would update that data the next time it passed the trailer. "The reader on the wagon is constantly pinging the yard," she explains.
Because the data is Web-based, Kroutch reports, it could also enable the firm to share location data with its suppliers, such as those interested in the location of a particular trailer loaded with their freight, or a third-party logistics company whose own trailer is located within the yard. However, she notes, the company is not yet sharing that information. Instead, users can access their equipment in the Supervalu yard based on parking agreements indicating general areas in which trailers are parked.
PINC Solutions devised the Yard Hound RFID solution several years ago, according to Aleks Göllü, the company's founder and CTO, as an alternative to systems that employ active RFID tags, or that use passive tags in conjunction with reader portals. Active tag systems, he says, are expensive to deploy, requiring a higher tag cost, as well as the need to situate many readers around the facility. Portal-based systems, on the other hand, provide location data only if a container or other tagged item passes near or through a portal.
"We [PINC Solutions] understand how yard management works," Göllü states, and thus decided to allow the solution to work with existing operations, by mounting a reader on each yard vehicle.
