Tejas Tubular Products, a provider of drill pipes and other products and services to the oil industry, is employing RFID technology to help track production, validate quality and boost efficiencies in its manufacturing operations.
Montreal-based Ship2Save implemented the system, which went live last month at the company’s Houston plant. The systemincorporates 915 MHz EPC Class 1 Gen 2 passive RFID tags and interrogators, as well as Ship2Save’s Operation Management System (S2S-OMS) middleware, designed to manage the RFID hardware and share RFID data with back-end systems, such as Tejas Tubular Products’ material requirements planning (MRP) system.
“Traceability is very important for us in this industry,” says Maximo Tejeda, president of Tejas Tubular Products. Every product the company makes must be certified according to the American Petroleum Institute, which requires manufacturers in the industry to provide a documented history for each product. That history must trace back to the specific heat number assigned to a particular batch of steel, which identifies its origin and chemical makeup.
“When fulfilling a work order, we have to track everything through processing to make sure a batch doesn’t get mixed with other batches,” Tejeda explains. “We produce steel to different grades. Different wells in oil fields, for example, are set to different depths. You don’t want a product designed for a 6,000-foot well to end up in an 18,000-foot well, because then you are looking at product failure.”
To track production, employees affix a plastic-laminated paper work order bearing an RFID tag to each pallet containing the steel used to make the products needed to fulfill that work order. The tag is encoded with a unique ID number, the number of which is associated, in the Tejas Tubular Products MRP system, with the requisite processing instructions for that order. As the pallets containing the steel sheets move through the production process, RFID interrogators read the tags to access the instructions, which workers can then read on their mobile computers. “This assures that product movement is happening in the proper sequence,” says Konrad Konarski, Ship2Save’s director of alliances.
A single work order could list 10,000 couplings, or a dozen drill pipes, and depending on the work order and product, more than one pallet of steel might be associated with each order. Once all processes are complete, the RFID tags for the work order are then encoded—or digitally signed—to indicate the products are finished. In addition, the tags are encoded with the heat number, product size dimensions, steel grade and other pertinent information culled from the MRP system.
“The whole idea,” Tejada says, “is to provide validation that the product is what the customer ordered. And it is a precaution. We won’t ship the wrong order, because we validate the order by reading the tag again just before we ship.”
Tejas Tubular Products will work with customers that want to install RFID readers on-site so they can validate orders as they come in. Currently, customers check paper-based packing lists shipped with each order. “Ideally,” Tejada says, “what we are hoping for is that they can adapt the technology and use the readers so validation can all be done automatically.”
Implementation of RFID interrogators at customer sites is not a requirement, though Tejeda says the company is already benefiting from RFID. Previously, production tracking was performed manually with paper and pencils, occasionally leading to errors.
What’s more, the automated system saves time because workers don’t have to hand-write the information. Sales people have access to real-time production data, collected via the RFID system and displayed on a “visibility dash-board,” a large flat-panel screen located in the sales office. “Mainly,” he states, “we want to service our customers as best we can, improve our efficiencies and improve our tracking.”
So far, Tejas Tubular Products has ordered about 5,000 tags and installed two fixed XR440 RFID interrogators and four handheld MC9090-G RFID mobile computers from Motorola. Tejeda says the company could possibly end up using up to 10,000 tags a month, if the implementation expands to its three other manufacturing plants. “We are just beginning with the technology,” he says. “I’m sure, as we get more used to it, we are going to discover more applications.”