Grammer, a German maker of seats for cars, trucks, and off-road vehicles, is using RFID to reduce the time and money required to locate seats and access their respective production information in the event of a vehicle or parts recall.
In a pilot that started in January at Grammer’s logistics center in Haselmuehl, near Amberg, the midsize manufacturer is affixing passive RFID tags on 200 to 300 seats per day. By year’s end, Grammer—which has about 8,900 employees and reported sales of approximately €881 million ($1.18 billion) in 2006—expects to tag as many as 3,000 seats each day.
The seats are designed for tractors, excavators, forklifts and other off-road vehicles built by a variety of vehicle manufacturers. If asked, says Thomas Ebert, head of the company’s SAP Customer Competence Center, Grammer needs to be able to tell its customers exactly when each seat—identified by a serial number—was produced. That information would be vital in the event of a recall. Currently, however, Grammer would be able to provide its customers only with a range of seat serial numbers that might be in question—a process that Ebert says can “take days and weeks.” Consequently, the company would need to recall a large number of vehicles to be sure no seats were omitted.
Using RFID, Grammer is able to provide customers quick feedback regarding the exact time when seats were built, as well as confirm safety information, such as the angle at which seat belts were affixed to seats, or the amount of force used to attach bolts and screws.
Grammer is using UPM Raflatac’s 869 MHz EPC Gen 2 tags, embedded in labels manually applied via adhesive to the plastic packaging wrapped around individual seats ready for shipment. Before a tag is applied, an interrogator from Deister Electronic reads the tag so its unique ID number can be associated with the seat’s serial number and production order number in Grammer’s SAP back-end software.
These numbers are documented via a camera photographing the production order for the seat on which the numbers are printed. “This,” explains Ebert, “allows us to have a data file for each seat in the Auto ID Infrastructure from SAP that includes the tag’s unique ID number, the production order number and the seat’s serial number.”
As each seat is finished, the system wraps it in thick, protective plastic wrap and applies the associated RFID tag to the plastic. The seats are then loaded into a large crate situated on a pallet. Once the crate is full, a forklift driver moves the pallet through an Intermec Technologies’ RFID portal, which interrogates the RFID tag on each seat, documenting the time and date of the read. That data is then sent to the SAP database to update the production information.
While planning for the pilot, Grammer spent significant time experimenting with the best tag positioning on the seats, before opting to tag the outside packaging. Ultimately, that position allowed for the most accurate readings because the tag was far from each seat’s metal parts. Additionally, tests performed on tags placed on the outside packaging resulted in high read rates, despite the different types of containers used to stack the seats, including mesh pallets, as well as cardboard and timber-frame containers. Finally, tagging the plastic packaging enabled Grammer to affix the tags during post-production—thus, its finely tuned processes did not need to be altered in any way.
Grammer spent two months testing the tags. Such a process, Ebert says, can be quite time-consuming because there are many tag types and makes to test. Still, he adds, testing tag positions—and deciding early on the information to be stored on each tag—is vital to success. Grammer knew it wanted each tag to carry only a unique ID number, but had it later decided to store more information on the tags, the initial time spent choosing tags would have been lost. “We discovered that the more information you want to store on a tag, the more you must interrupt your production process,” he says. “We aimed for an RFID solution that would influence the existing production process as little as possible.”
Grammer also determined, during the pilot, that its RFID application was best served by industrial PCs with built-in keyboards, which are more reliable and stable than standard desktops. What’s more, they can be locked away in cabinets when not in use, reducing the possibility of workers tampering with them.
Within the next two to three years, the company plans to expand its RFID system to all production lines at each of its factories in Bulgaria, China, Turkey and the United States. “We have had major time savings,” Ebert says, “and through this, we have saved lots of money.” In addition, he adds, the company can now keep less money in reserves to resolve recall questions, since it faces less risk of needing to recall a large number of seats.
Grammer is not the first vehicle seating manufacturer to use RFID in its production processes. Johnson Controls began using RFID in 2003 to improve its ability to deliver the correct number and type of seats, in the exact order customers requested (see Perfecting Just-In-Time Production).