Feb 27, 2013Grupo Vidrala, a manufacturer of glass containers used by the food and agriculture industries, is employing an RFID system—with EPC Gen 2 readers installed on forklifts, and tags affixed to loaded pallets—at three of its factories, in order to improve efficiency by tracking products from the point of production to when the goods are loaded onto trucks destined for customers. The Spanish-based company has been expanding its operations throughout the past decade, with the addition of three Spanish production centers, as well as plants in Italy, Portugal and Belgium. The firm's 13 glass-melting furnaces have the combined capacity to produce more than 3.5 billion containers. After introducing a SAP software system at all of its facilities, Vidrala began seeking other technology solutions that could tie into that warehouse-management system, in order to improve efficiency and be able to track every pallet. After completing its installation of the RFID system at plants in Spain and Portugal, management has been able to reduce the amount of time required for moving product, and to receive alerts in the event that errors occur.
Speaker: José Manuel Delicado, Chief of Maintenance, Research and Development, Grupo Vidrala