A manufacturer of asphalt products is employing radio frequency identification at its 16 locations throughout the United States, to improve the inspection process of eyewash stations, fire extinguishers and other safety equipment. The company is also using the RFID system to ensure the inspections are conducted on time, and that the results are available electronically.
The system, provided by CASE Inc., based in Tuscaloosa, Al., was installed in December 2008. According to Thomas McKane, CASE’s CEO, the system has already yielded two results. First, it has made the inspection process faster and simpler, saving inspectors an average of approximately 30 percent of their time. What had previously been managed on paper, with reports manually handwritten and filed in a folder, is now available electronically. A secondary benefit has been that the RFID system ensures inspections are conducted according to schedule, and that the results are available when required. With the paper-based method, on the other hand, inspections were sometimes simply not performed—and tracking those missed inspections was time-consuming and, therefore, rarely accomplished.
The RFID system has already proven to address those problems, McKane reports. The company is using Ferroxcube‘s 13.56 MHz high-frequency (HF) passive RFID tags, handheld RFID interrogators from Tracient Technology, and Motion Computing‘s F5 tablet PCs with built-in readers, along with CASE software to help the firm track data related to inspections at multiple sites.
The asphalt manufacturer (which McKane says has asked not to be named) has thousands of pieces of safety equipment that must be inspected weekly, monthly or annually. The regular inspections are intended to ensure the equipment is present and available for employees at all times, as well as being in working order. Prior to utilizing the RFID system, inspections were manually recorded on paper and stored in file cabinets to be accessed by management or government agencies, when necessary. When inspectors wrote their reports on a piece of paper using pen and clipboard, however, not only was the process slow, but the results were often sketchy and sometimes inaccurate. The RFID system improves this process by automating the reporting of inspections, and by making data available electronically on the same day that the inspections occur.
In November 2009, after testing several types of RFID readers and tags, CASE selected Tracient’s and Motion Computing’s devices, as well as Ferroxcube’s RFID tags. According to McKane, the Ferroxcube tags, which comply with the ISO 15693 standard, operate well in metallic environments and were less expensive than other tags, making them the best tag choice for this project. Nearly every tag in such applications, he says, is mounted directly on metal. Ferroxcube tags contain antennas made of ferrite—a material that can concentrate the magnetic component of radio waves, thereby making the antenna highly sensitive. McKane says it was the tags’ cost and high functionality that persuaded him to include them in this solution.
Inspectors now carry one of the company’s 70 tablet PCs to capture tag ID numbers, McKane says—or, alternatively, they can carry one of 45 Tracient RFID interrogators, which can transmit via Bluetooth to a PC tablet assigned to that inspector. Before beginning their work, inspectors input their own ID number into the reader or tablet PC, indicating they will conduct all inspections to follow. The Motion Computing PCs with built-in RFID interrogators can be used to capture the ID number on the tag attached to an item to be inspected, and CASE software installed on the tablet then displays a series of yes/no questions that the inspector must answer, as well as other questions requiring numerical responses. Those answers are saved in the tablet PC and transmitted to the company’s Microsoft SQL back-end system via a Wi-Fi or cable connection.
For situations in which the RFID tags may be difficult to access, such as the back of a pump housing, an inspector can utilize the Tracient PadlR RFID reader, which has a wand-like shape that fits better in small places, thus enabling the inspector to get close enough to the tags—which have a read range of no more than 1 inch. Because the interrogator has a Bluetooth connection to the tablet PC, all inspection data—such as the condition of a particular piece of equipment—can be updated on the Tracient reader and stored on the tablet PC, then sent from there back to the SQL server. That server is accessible to managers in separate plants or offices, via the company’s intranet.
While the PadlR reader’s advantage is its ability to capture reads in difficult places, the tablet PC contains a camera that inspectors can use, if necessary, to photograph the device being inspected, as well as a Wi-Fi network card. This, McKane says, makes the two devices together a complete solution.
The asphalt company first began discussing an RFID solution and testing hardware with CASE in 2008. It sought an off-the-shelf solution, but bar codes were deemed insufficient as a solution because the tags would be worn or damaged and require replacement. The firm first conducted a pilot of the RFID system it currently uses in November, with approximately 50 tags at one of the company’s locations. It was then deployed in other facilities by March of this year, with more than 7,000 tags now in use for thousands of fire extinguishers and other equipment.
The deployment is 90 percent complete, McKane says, and there are plans in place for expanding the system to include other preventative-maintenance tasks. Eventually, he adds, CASE intends to offer similar solutions to other companies as well.