You would think it would be difficult to misplace large pieces of glass used to make the huge sheets that adorn corporate headquarters and gleaming Las Vegas casinos.
Until recently, however, that’s just what was happening too often at Viracon Inc., an Owatonna, MN, maker of architectural glass products. In fact, the company estimated that workers looking for the carriers on which glass is stored and transported at Viracon’s three plants could find them in a timely manner only 60% of the time. That ended up delaying customer orders and driving up Viracon’s costs, since losing track of the highly customized glass sections meant Viracon often was forced to refabricate the materials, scrapping the original glass once it was finally found.
Early last year, officials at Viracon, a unit of $880 million Apogee Enterprises Inc., decided to do something about their missing glass carrier problem and implemented an RFID-based asset tracking system based on technology from AeroScout. The system, which tracks more than 5,000 carriers, tells Viracon production and warehouse workers where specific carriers are in less than a minute, with 99% accuracy. It has allowed Viracon to reduce scrap due to tracking problems by 65% while improving machine utilization and cutting labor costs that had previously gone into the search for glass carriers.
The project earned Viracon the 2009 Progressive Manufacturing High Achiever award for Operational Excellence.
Key to the success of Viracon’s Work-in-Process Glass Carrier Tracking initiative, says project leader and Vice President of Process Improvement Sheila Meixner, was integration of the AeroScout asset tracking system and Viracon’s homegrown manufacturing execution system. The integration, implemented by Viracaon’s internal application development group, allows the company’s production workers to search for all carriers associated with specific work orders rather than searching for carriers one by one. That has helped Viracon significantly improve overall asset utilization.
Now that the glass carrier tracking system has been deployed at the company’s three plants in Minnesota, Georgia, and Utah, Viracon plans to expand the system, Meixner says. In its Statesboro, GA, plant, Viracon is testing a project to place wireless-enabled laptop computers on forklifts, allowing operators to search for carriers without leaving their vehicles. The company is also evaluating using the active RFID system to track carriers provided by suppliers as they leave Viracon’s plants.
“The system has already been a big success,” Meixner says. “Now it’s just a question of establishing the business case for expanding it.”