Jul 24, 2006Composite Mat Solutions (CMS) manufactures mats used by firms in a wide range of industries, from energy and oil extraction companies to entertainment and sports arenas. The high-density polyethylene used to manufacture the mats provides durability in extreme temperatures and in very wet or dry conditions. The mats are often used as temporary flooring for storing heavy industrial equipment. For example, the Alaska Department of Transportation uses them at an airstrip maintenance shop that houses snow-removal equipment.
To identify the batch in which a mat was manufactured, CMS has historically stamped a metal tag, embossed with a batch number, into each mat's sidewall. The company tracks the date and time each batch was made, as well as the temperature and humidity level at the time of manufacture, by associating this data with the batch number. But reading the number stamped on each mat sometimes becomes difficult once the mat goes through years of heavy use. The metal tag can get soiled beyond readability or, in some cases, may fall off. CMS needed a more reliable way of identifying its mat products. Plus, it wanted to find a means of serializing the IDs, so that the mats could be tracked individually, rather than just by batch. This would provide the company with great visibility into its inventory of mats, which it both rents and sells.
Last year, the company decided it wanted to embed a passive RFID tag in each of its two main products: the large (8 foot by 14 foot) Dura-base mat and the smaller (4 foot by 4 foot) Bravo. It is would use a serialized ID encoded to each tag to track its manufacturing records and to link tagged mats to their respective rental or purchase orders.
To integrate tagging into its manufacturing process and begin tracking the mats, CMS turned to RFID Logic, RFID systems integrator based in Marietta, Ga. RFID Logic spent nearly two years testing RFID tags and configuring the interrogation zones needed to track the mats' movements. It tested six different passive RFID tags before finding ones that met CMS' criteria: The company wanted to be able to read each truckload of tagged mats with 100 percent accuracy as the truck passes through the yard gate on its way to its renter or purchaser.
"For the large Dura-base mats, we were getting 100 percent read accuracy from the get-go," explains Andy Shapira, vice president of operations for RFIDlogic. But only 38 Dura-base mats fit in a truckload, as opposed to the 430 that comprise a truckload of the Bravo mat. Reading 430 tags in a matter of seconds as the truck moved through the gate proved much more challenging and required the careful placement of three antennas mounted on each side of gate to reach 100 percent read accuracy. CMS also added a speed bump to the gate, in order to ensure that the trucks would drive through the interrogation zone slowly.
CMS is using Symbol's fixed-position and handheld RFID interrogators to read the tags. It is also using an RFID middleware platform called Shadowfax, developed by RFIDlogic, to assign and manage the serial numbers encoded to the tags to filter and aggregate the data collected from the tags as they are read. Because CMS does not plan on adding tags to the mats made before tagging was integrated into the manufacturing line, the company keeps the tagged mats physically segregated from the older, non-tagged ones. When fulfilling a rental or purchase order, CMS uses only all tagged or all untagged mats. Because the mats have a 10 to 15-year lifespan, it will likely have non-tagged mats in its rental stock for many years.
When a load of mats leaves the facility, the readers send a manifest of the truckload's tag IDs to the Shadowfax database. The Shadowfax software is not integrated with any of CMS's existing software. But because it is Web-based, the CMS accounting department can access the manifest online and associate it, within CMS' accounting software, with the corresponding rental or purchase agreement. The manifest enables CMS to confirm the exact number of mats being shipped out. When rented mats are returned to the CMS facility, their tags are read again, generating a return manifest. CMS uses this to ensure that the mats being returned are the same ones that were rented. The tags also enable CMS to back up any claims it decides to make on the renter based on damage done to the mats while the mats were rented, since the ID encoded to a damaged mat's tags can be easily traced to the renter. In addition, CMS expects that the RFID system will help it more accurately track its manufacturing process, since the date, time and environmental data is automatically linked to each tag ID. In the older system, a worker needed to read the ID stamped to each metal tag and write it into a logbook.
But CMS also considers the tags inside the new mats a selling tool, since its customers could also use the tags to track and identify the tags within their own operations. So CMS is acting as a reseller for the Shadowfax middleware and the Symbol readers that it uses. So far, only one CMS customer has purchased the readers and middleware to track the Dura-base mats it purchased, but Ron Houghton, Dura-base sales director, expects that number to grow.
Some customers "already have 3,000 mats without RFID tags in them, so they won't want to get a reader today," he says. "But as they begin replacing those mats [with RFID-tagged mats], they will begin to buy the readers."
