Feb 10, 2017Before launching four years ago to solve business problems and automate processes for car dealerships, Canadian technology systems supplier FoxTrac was already developing solutions with passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags to track vehicles during warranty, maintenance or repair services at authorized repair shops. However, the company faced an even greater need: to find specific cars within a yard in which thousands of vehicles are parked—especially during winter, when they can be virtually invisible under a thick layer of snow.
While searching for a solution that could address this challenge while still allowing inventory counts to be carried out in a more efficient and constant manner, Marco Lisi, FoxTrac's CEO, turned to RFID specialist SmartX Technology, which develops and deploys radio frequency identification and Internet of Things technologies, with a focus on results for businesses.
Lisi, a family member who owns two BMW dealerships in Montreal, says that one of the main bottlenecks for companies in this sector is having to precisely control millions of dollars' worth of inventory that cannot be checked at the desired frequency.
"It took us a day and a half to check the vehicles parked on one of the courtyards, even with five staffers doing the counting and reading of the serial numbers in the traditional way—that is, by hand, one by one," Lisi says. With the drone and beacons (Bluetooth Low Energy tags) from SmartX, he adds, the same task can be completed within only 10 minutes.
"Normally, car resellers only inventory once a year because the manual process takes a lot of time and is expensive," Lisi explains. According to the entrepreneur, controlling inventory in the past required that employees proceed to each car in order to write down its serial number by hand. "With passive RFID tags, it would be easier, except when snow covers vehicles, which prevents UHF readers from interrogating the tags."
Lisi says he found the solution to this challenge when he met with SmartX Technology. "Now, with the beacons we've developed with SmartX," he states, "we put a drone to fly in the yard filled with snow-covered vehicles, and we know exactly which ones are there." The process has become much more effective, he reports. "We are still conducting tests, but after this stage, we will offer the solution to all Canadian car dealerships." The U.S. market will be the next step in this initiative, Lisi says.
Monitoring the locations of vehicles within courtyards can be extremely costly in day-by-day operations, says Carlos Ribeiro, SmartX Technology's CEO. "Under normal conditions," he says, "a vehicle can take something from six to eight hours to be found, even using bar codes or RFID portals at the entrance of the yards. There are reports of trucks that wait more than three hours to be loaded if a specific vehicle cannot being found. "
In some cases, Ribeiro says, logistics operators lose 60 percent of their time searching for a particular car in the yard, which contains thousands of similar models and colors. "The situation is worse in extreme conditions, such as snow or at night," he explains, "when this process is usually interrupted and thousands of cars have to wait for better conditions to be loaded onto the trucks."
Ribeiro believes that smart drones for reading RFID tags will become a much-needed tool in distribution centers. "In the case of logistics in courtyards, thousands of vehicles can be tracked, for example, in three to four hours' flying time," he states. "The drones will make the RFID tag-reading process mobile, via forklifts with collectors and embedded readers."
According to Ribeiro, the first phase of this evolution will include the process of high-volume scanning of RFID tags, as well as connectivity challenges and monitoring the drones' flight safety and operating autonomy—for instance, amplifying battery life and daily flight plans.
"Smartx is employing high-quality commercial drones and is already working on the second step, which is information processing, analytical data generation and alarms on customer-defined parameter deviations," Ribeiro says. "Our system is already capable not only of locating a vehicle, but of warning that it should not be where it was found."
Lisi says he is excited by the business opportunity afforded by the tracking and inventory solution with BLE drones and beacons. However, he is also focused on developing a system based on passive UHF RFID tags to keep customers informed about the progress of the maintenance or repair of their vehicles at the authorized workshops.
"This is the first project we have developed: an RFID tag to track cars during services," Lisi says. "We install checkpoints [with passive UHF RFID reading portals] in the parking lot, yard, workshop or washing room, for instance. When a car passes one of these checkpoints, the owner receives information about this on his or her smartphone."
This was FoxTrac's way of keeping car owners up to date without ever having to call the dealership. "The car looks like Amazon's shopping package," Lisi explains. "You know exactly where it is every moment you want, and even get informed about the exact day of delivery and also about the approximate time."
With the FoxTrac system, each car receives an RFID tag embedded in a rubber plate with a unique identification number. "When the vehicle arrives in the laundry area, which is the last step of the workshop," Lisi states, "the owner automatically receives a message on his cell phone, saying that his car is ready for pickup." He adds, "Our service solution is currently being tested on 150 cars per day at two dealerships." However, the drone solution for inventory is already in operation with 900 vehicles at one of the BMW dealerships in Montreal.
"Passive UHF RFID tags are cheaper and thus more feasible for the workshop environment, in which they are handled at all times and can fall or become lost," Lisi explains. "Beacons, on the other hand, make it easier to locate vehicles even in extreme conditions, such as under snow."
FoxTrac's automotive tracking solution utilizes RFID readers from Impinj. The passive UHF RFID tags being used are produced by FoxTrac and its partners.