Metal Finishing Co., a Wichita, Kan., metal plating and finishing firm for the aerospace and agriculture industries, will begin employing a newly released ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID encoder installed in a Lexmark T654 monochrome laser printer to track the movement of products throughout its facility. The RFID-enabled T654 printer, Metal Finishing indicates, offers flexibility other RFID printer-encoders do not yet provide, thereby enabling the firm to print multiple documents with some pages containing an adhesive RFID label, and other pages consisting of inexpensive plain paper. The device will also allow the company to dictate the RFID inlay’s position on a page, as well as its orientation—either vertical or horizontal. The resulting flexibility, the company explains, will make it easier for Metal Finishing to print the combination of tags and documents it requires to track its production processes, without spending time and money printing tags on an RFID printer-encoder and printing plain documents on another printer.
Each day at its facility, which covers more than 1 million square feet of space, the company processes hundreds of orders and thousands of parts, such as bushings and landing-gear assemblies. Its customers are typically machining shops that send metal parts to Metal Finishing for the finishing work, then sell them to aerospace and agriculture customers upon receiving the completed product back from Metal Finishing.
According to Rob Babst, Metal Finishing’s CEO, the company uses the RFID-enabled T654 printer in conjunction with an RFID system the firm installed last year to track the progress of its orders, as well as provide updates regarding orders for its customers on an Internet portal. Prior to deploying the RFID-enabled T654 printer, the firm employed one device to print paperwork and a second machine to print and encode EPC Gen 2 UHF RFID adhesive tags that it attaches to items as they arrive at the facility, as well as to related documents, so it can then follow them through finishing process until the products are shipped back to customers.
RFID interrogators throughout the facility capture the tags’ unique ID numbers as the items pass through the finishing process, not only allowing for status updates on particular orders, but also helping the company track the productivity of its operations and identify any bottlenecks. Using RFID in combination with software provided by Chicago-based American RFID Solutions (ARS), residing on the firm’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Metal Finishing has not only been able to improve the effectiveness of its finishing processes, but it can also let customers log into a special section on the firm’s Web site to learn about the status of their orders. With the RFID system, a user can enter an item’s tag ID number to see what process that item most recently completed, in addition to which actions remain to be taken before it is shipped.
“We had tracked everything on paper; then we evolved to a bar-code system, relying on manual scans,” Babst says, describing the system the company used prior to adopting RFID in summer 2008. “That can sometimes be problematic,” he adds, since bar-coded labels did not always get scanned, and manually scanning them was time-consuming.
ARS and Metal Finishing had determined that printing RFID tags in conjunction with production orders at the receiving dock would be the more efficient solution. Both the plain documents and RFID-tagged pages could then be tucked into a plastic sleeve, after which the sleeve and its paperwork would travel with the part as it moved down the line and on to shipping, with tags attached to the document and the item being read by interrogators at several points on the shop floor. The best solution for this plan, Metal Finishing ultimately decided, was an RFID-enabled version of the T654, which has multiple trays and the capacity to print both RFID-embedded pages and plain pages from a single command.
When Lexmark introduced the T654 monochrome laser printer in October 2008, the device lacked the ability to encode RFID tags. That deficiency was rectified last week, when the company announced the release of the UHF RFID option for that model. The option, an add-on paper drawer containing a built-in RFID encoder and installed within a printer in place of an ordinary paper drawer, is available for an estimated street price of $2,499 (in addition to the T654’s $1,200 price tag), and can print and encode RFID label media at a rate of up to 20 pages per minute. The system can support a variety of adhesive labels and other print media, ranging in size from 5 inches by 7 inches to 8.5 inches by 14 inches, and the RFID tags can be embedded within the media either horizontally or vertically.
Metal Finishing is utilizing the T654 to print out an order’s paperwork, consisting of up to 19 pages of plain text on regular 8-by-11-inch paper, as well as a cover page containing an adhesive RFID. The ability of the RFID-enabled T654 to print and encode a tag regardless of that tag’s position or orientation permits the company to print tags with the RFID antenna positioned in such a way that the chip can be most easily read by interrogators on the shop floor, based on the size and shape of the item on which they may be affixed. Paper labels with embedded tags are placed in the RFID-enabled paper drawer. When Metal Finishing wants to tag an item, an adhesive RFID label is encoded with a unique ID number that is also stored in the back-end system, where it is linked to the work order regarding the item being tagged. Pinnacle Label, of Buffalo, N.Y., is providing the RFID-enabled paper being used by Metal Finishing.
In March 2007, Lexmark launched the T640rn RFID-enabled laser printer—the predecessor to Lexmark’s RFID-enabled T654 model (see New Office Laser Printer Encodes Tags). The T640rn, however, could only print and encode tags oriented horizontally, says Eric Calvert, Lexmark’s worldwide product marketing manager, whereas the new printer offers additional flexibility for end users, allowing the placement of a tag anywhere, other than within a half-inch-wide margin along the edges of an 8-by-11-inch page. The T654, Calvert says, can also accommodate up to three paper drawers to hold print media of varying sizes and quality.
When Metal Finishing first adopted its RFID system one year ago, the company eliminated manual entry and bar-code scanning of data, Babst says, thereby shortening the processing time of each order by 30 to 60 seconds. He predicts the new printer will shorten that time further. The next step, he says, is to expand the RFID system to some of Metal Finishing’s customers by installing RFID-enabled Lexmark T654 printers at their locations so each item can be tracked from the time it leaves a customer’s site bound for Metal Finishing, until it is processed and returned to the client. This will make it possible for Metal Finishing to know when a specific product has been shipped to its plant, as well as when it has been received back at the machinist’s site.
“It’s also a good sales tool,” Babst states, “allowing us to provide a Web portal to customers to enter and look at their parts and their status.” The payback of that service, he adds, is intangible “but we definitely see a benefit in it.”