Jul 15, 2020Biomecanica, a Brazilian manufacturer of orthopedic prostheses, adopted iTag RFID Etiquetas Inteligentes' technology in 2016, and it has "since celebrated that decision every day," says Ricardo Brito, the company's CEO and CMO. According to Brito, a reduction in the amount of time required to perform inventory counts of its 140,000 items in stock is just one example of the efficiencies the firm has gained with the RFID system. The counting process before the RFID deployment took 15 days, with an accuracy rate of only 80 percent. With RFID, however, that same task can now be performed within a day with 99.9 percent accuracy. The results of the company's success case were presented at RFID Journal LIVE! 2016.
The benefit of having full visibility of its inventory, Brito says, has brought gains that extend to the company's production line, since Biomecanica's products are created with RFID tags built in. "Smart tags are in the DNA of our products," he explains, "because they are inserted in raw materials and finished products. Now, we no longer produce any goods that we think are not available—only those that are necessary, because we know everything we have in stock."
Ricardo Brito
Another powerful benefit from the RFID solution, Brito says, has been the speed at which workers can now pick items for a given order. "Instead of requiring three hours to find everything that was requested by a customer," he explains, "we have managed to carry out this same task within only a few minutes." In 2015, Brito met Sérgio Gambim, iTag's CEO, at the office of an RFID supplier company in Switzerland. "Thanks to the good business relationship we have generated, we have developed the successful RFID project at Biomecanica."
After almost three decades since its foundation, Biomecanica decided to be a pioneer and implement radio frequency identification in its shipping area, which made it possible to reduce the number of steps in the process. The four phases (separation, checking, billing and shipping) were carried out manually, item by item, with barcode readers. To fulfill an order for 200 pieces, the entire process, from sorting to shipping, previously required three hours of work. With the RFID system in place, preparing a batch of that size now requires only 20 minutes.
After the RFID implementation, three of the four stages of the shipping process were optimized, the company reports. During the first phase, the gains were in the speed and accuracy of the items selected for each order, which brought reliability to the products available in stock. For the second phase, the counting of items for each order was carried out on a grand scale, with a large number of products being read automatically and without the need for manual intervention. Next, billing was facilitated and streamlined due to the first two phases guaranteeing that 100 percent of the products collected would be in an order, thereby avoiding delivery delays and fostering customer satisfaction.
Another major change was in the sending of shipments—that is, in the dispatching of orders, which are now checked by RFID. The check between each order and what is sent to customers takes place during this part of the process, at a booth containing RFID readers. The booths are completely enclosed and the products for each order are placed inside them, where the reading antennas collect the Electronic Product Code and GS1 numbers for each label and every item. The information appears on a liquid crystal display, which notes any errors found.
"There were two major challenges during the implementation," Gambim says. "The first was that the products are manufactured with metallic raw materials, which can cause interference in the signals read by the RFID antennas. The second was the positioning of the antennas inside the booth to allow the reading of every product manufactured by Biomecanica." These challenges, he reports, have been overcome by the teams dedicated to the system's implementation.
The decision to invest in RFID was taken by Biomecanica's New Business Directorate, and the deployment had the strategic support of the company's IT and R&D departments. Among the benefits obtained, the company says, are the optimization of its shipping process. Other gains include an increase in daily invoicing capacity, proportional to the processing time reduction in the shipping area; a decrease in operational costs for the shipping area, with an optimization of employee productivity; a reduction of personnel in the shipping area by 25 percent during the first 90 days; and a boost in inventory count accuracy. The latter directly impacts the financial, fiscal, commercial and production departments, the company explains.
Sérgio Gambim
In addition to the aforementioned gains, Biomecanica has increased the security of its stock, allowing its purchasing department to correctly program the acquisition of raw materials, as well as extend predictability to the manufacturing area. Having total traceability of products sold, the company notes, has enabled it to reduce the amount of bureaucracy and reporting in its enterprise resource planning system.
With the RFID solution in place, Biomecanica has been able to avoid human failures in separating and sending products to customers. It has eliminated complaints regarding missing items in shipments, and it has gained a competitive brand advantage, coupled with cutting-edge technologies that guarantee the origin and safety of its products. What's more, RFID has reduced order-fulfillment times, positively impacting the market, while allowing more orders to be leveraged.
"The main challenge in the Biomecanica project," Gambim says, "was the type of material read, as the entire product line contains 100 percent metal in its composition. In addition, we had to read the items at various points in the process, which made issues involving tag reading even more challenging." The various products contain metal in their structure, and they are mixed and packaged together, within the smallest possible volume due to freight costs. "This was the main focus of iTAG," he states. "Passing along to the customer the certainty that 100 percent of all sealed items will be read is another achievement."
