Peg Pérego USA, a Fort Wayne, Ind., manufacturer of toys and other children’s products, will begin implementing an RFID system at the end of October. This new system will automatically tag individual boxes of toy riding vehicles as they are produced in its factory. Eventually, Pérego plans to extend the system to receive automatically the parts it uses to make those vehicles.
The first phase of the RFID installation, overseen by RFID systems integrator Northern Apex-RFID, will take place this fall at one of the company’s four assembly lines. By the end of October, says Ken Maxwell, Pérego’s vice president of marketing, all finished items traveling down the conveyor will be boxed, labeled with an RFID tag and sent through a series of readers (interrogators). This will help the company track when the items were manufactured, as well as where they are within the facility’s warehouse prior to shipping.
According to Maxwell, Pérego can manufacture up to 5,000 items in one day. The company, he says, hopes to determine the effectiveness of the system, especially in ensuring a high read rate, before expanding the RFID deployment to its three other conveyors, as well as back to the company’s suppliers. As an added bonus, retailers that have deployed RFID interrogators and software would also benefit by being able to use each product’s RFID tag to track inventory at their own distribution centers, back rooms, shelves and point-of-sale terminals.
Pérego will use an RFID label applicator to encode and apply an RFID label automatically to the box of each toy as it passes down the assembly line’s conveyor. An RFID interrogator installed at the end of the line will capture the unique number of the applied RFID tag. The boxes will then be palletized prior to being moved to a warehouse near the production building.
Pérego has not yet decided whether to tag pallets, Maxwell says, though the company is considering that option A reader at the door of the production building will capture the RFID numbers of item tags as the pallets leave the factory. RFID readers installed at the entrance to the warehouse will read the tags, and the items will remain on the pallets until an order from a retailer arrives at the warehouse. To fill an order, workers will pull the items off the pallets and put them on another conveyor to bring them to the truck for loading.
An RFID reader installed at the end of the loading conveyor will read each item’s tag, matching it with the customer order in Pérego’s SAP system. According to Matt Foreman, Northern Apex-RFID’s sales and development business manager, the company is engineering the RFID system to stop the loading conveyor if a box is discovered heading onto the truck without a tag, or if the wrong number of items are being loaded. “This ensures accurate loading and prevents human error at the critical shipment point,” he explains.
Northern Apex is still considering six possible tag manufacturers to supply the EPC Gen 2 915 MHz labels, Foreman says, adding that reader manufacturers have not yet been determined either. “Our goal is to put the right reader and right tag that gets the level of read rates very, very high,” Foreman says. “It has to be close to perfect.”
To integrate the RFID system with Peg Pérego’s existing SAP software system, Northern Apex will provide Peg Pérego with its Galaxy software suite. This suite includes RFID automation device-control software and a graphical user interface.
“We’re going to begin by setting the system up on one assembly line, and then roll it out on the rest of the assembly lines,” Maxwell says. “Right now, we’re looking at [tagging] finished goods.” That will change, however, he predicts.
Components from the parent company arrive at the Fort Wayne facility in kits, each of which includes parts for one riding toy. If the box containing the entire kit were tagged, Maxwell says, the company could track when the components arrived and when they were assembled onto a toy. Peg Pérego USA is in discussion with its Italian parent, Peg Pérego, to have components tagged in Milan. Eventually, Maxwell states, the U.S. company would like its other suppliers to tag individual components.