Dec 19, 2012Bereket Döner, one of Turkey's largest producers of frozen and ready-to-serve meat products, is employing radio frequency identification to track its goods as they are loaded onto pallets, weighed and shipped to customers. Doner meat is similar to the Greek gyro. In Istanbul, the meat is cooked, seasoned, cut and boxed, and then stored in freezers prior to being shipped to restaurant operators—90 percent of which are located in Turkey.
Thanks to an RFID system provided by RFID Enabled Solutions (RES), the company can automatically identify each box of product. This not only improves visibility regarding when meat is weighed prior to shipment, as well as which customer's order is being filled at any given time, but also prevents shrinkage, since RFID readers at the doorways detect if unsold tagged meat is being removed. If that occurs, the system issues an alert before the potential thief has had time to leave the facility.
The solution includes RES' AIMS software, residing on Bereket Döner's back-end system, to manage data encoded to tags placed on meat before it is fully stretch-wrapped and boxed, according to Neco Can, RES' cofounder, president and CEO. The system also includes readers at a weighing station, he says, as well as in doorways. It was installed last year for use by the facility's morning shift, while the firm is now looking into expanding its use to other shifts.
To manufacture its products, Bereket Döner first processes meat, and then stretch-wraps it and shock-freezes it to approximately -40 degrees Celsius (-40 degrees Fahrenheit). The meat is packaged in boxes, which are moved into another freezer for storage at -18 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) until being pulled for orders.
Once an order is received, the meat—which typically weighs between 4 and 70 kilograms (8.8 and 154 pounds)—is removed from the freezer, loaded onto pallets and weighed. The details stored in the company's software include the meat's stock-keeping unit (SKU), production date and weight. To identify a particular product, Bereket Döner had been scanning the bar code printed on its box, but the company was concerned that the scanning process was excessively time-consuming. For example, if the product sat outside the freezer for too long (while the staff scanned the bar code of every box on a pallet) prior to being loaded, spoilage could result. What's more, the manufacturing plant had no protection against theft.
With the RES system, the meat is stretch-wrapped after being processed. An Alien Technology ALN-9654 G ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) EPC Gen 2 passive RFID tag is then applied after the first layer of plastic wrapping, after which the wrapping is continued with many more layers of plastic over the tag, thereby making it impossible to remove without cutting the packaging and thus rendering the product unsellable. The tag is commissioned when a worker scans the bar code on the front of the tag, which has the same ID number as the one encoded to the tag's RFID chip, which is also read at that time via a Motorola XR400 interrogator. The AIMS RFID-enabled inventory- and order-management system then stores that ID, along with the meat's size and production date.
When a restaurant places an order, that order is entered into the company's SQL-based management system, which shares that information with the AIMS software. Workers at the plant pick products from the freezer to fill the order, and load the boxes onto a pallet containing other meat for a specific order (typically, 125 to 130 boxes are loaded onto a single pallet). The loaded pallets are moved through an RFID reader portal, where the meat is weighed. The weights and unique tag ID numbers are then stored together in the AIMS software, along with other details, such as each item's description and production date.
Ensuring that the tags—which have endured the freezing process and are packed against meat—could be read was a challenge, Can says. The company developed an enclosed reader portal with doors on both ends to prevent stray reads from tags on separate pallets, which was set up in a hallway through which loaded pallets pass while en route to the loading dock. The portal contains two readers—a Motorola FX7400 interrogator and an Alien Technology ALR-9900+ model—as well as four Motorola AN 400 antennas attached to a rotating arm that moves the antennas around the loaded pallet to ensure that all tags are read.
If any individuals pass through one of the plant's seven exits with a box of meat, or a pallet loaded with meat not yet read at the scale, the system issues an alert to management so the situation can be addressed before that person has left the premises. The company has set up Motorola XR400 readers to capture the ID numbers of tags passing through the exit doors.
Before Bereket Döner adopted the RFID system, RES reports, it took between three and 30 minutes for the staff to weigh a loaded pallet and capture shipping data prior to sending a loaded pallet to a customer. With RFID, the firm reports, it takes almost no time at all. To date, the technology is being used only for morning shifts, while the company is still training employees to utilize the technology during the evening shifts. The company has used approximately 450,000 tags in one year.
According to Can, the tags operate well even after withstanding the extreme temperatures necessary to freeze the meat—though at -40 degrees, they are more difficult to read. This does not create problems for Bereket Döner, however, since the tags are only read after being removed from the second, warmer freezer. Bereket Döner did not respond to requests for comments regarding this story.
