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by Chris Chiappinelli, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Befuddled by retailers' mandates that appear long on requirements and short on return, many manufacturers have turned away from RFID. But confining deployments to inside the plant's four walls could turn them around. |
| Keywords: | RFID inside the plant's four walls, closed-loop RFID |
RFID means many things to many people. To some, it's a confusing and unproven technology; to others, it's a boon to operations and the bottom line.
The key to understanding and exploiting RFID, many analysts say, is to start by keeping any deployment closed loop, or confined to the four walls of the plant. Open-looped systems, such as retailer-enforced projects involving multiple locations and affiliated parties, require more sophistication and expense, and don't always lead to a substantial return on investment.
But don't confuse closed-loop with stand-alone. In almost all cases, the RFID system must interact with — indeed, derives its value from interacting with — incumbent technology, such as a manufacturing execution or inventory management system.
A 2007 ARC Advisory study found that more manufacturers are beginning to focus RFID on closed-loop implementations. Thirty-three percent of survey respondents who intended to use RFID planned to use it for fixed asset tracking, 32% for reusable container tracking, 26% for engineered asset tracking, and 16% for tracking IT assets.
In this article, we'll look at three such closed-loop RFID installations and the integration it took to realize their benefits.
Tracking Jaguar/Land Rover
Before Jaguar/Land Rover parted ways with Ford Motor Co. to become part of Tata Motors in March, the company learned a few tricks from its parent.
RFID underlies two important processes at Jaguar/Land Rover. One, an RFID-based materials replenishment system — a version of e-kanban — that the automaker inherited from Ford has earned much attention in recent years for its success in enabling a lean manufacturing environment.
In that process, when a particular component alongside the assembly line is running low, a worker pushes a nearby button that is integrated with an active RFID tag made by WhereNet Corp., a Zebra Technologies company. The tag's signal is picked up by antennae that relay the information to a server, which then translates the button ID into a part number. The integrated system then displays an order on a screen in that component's stock location, where a forklift driver uses a touch screen to print a ticket indicating which part to collect and where on the track to take it.
The e-kanban system nicely complements the company's lean efforts, says Dave O'Reilly, manager of manufacturing and purchasing IT for Jaguar/Land Rover. Based on the data produced by the WhereNet system, plant managers were able to determine the most efficient quantity of components to hold line-side, reduce the overall number of forklift movements, and eventually reduce the number of drivers.
The system made a believer out of O'Reilly, who said that, before its implementation, he thought of RFID as a technology best suited to applications outside the manufacturing arena. "That was our first real insight into, 'Hey, this is clever, this RFID,' " he says.
Approximately two years ago, that insight led to a new directive: Create an RFID-based system that could track finished vehicles once they leave the assembly line, but before they are dispatched for delivery.
For years, Land Rover had played an unwitting game of hide-and-seek with its finished vehicles. On a 300-acre site, even an outsized SUV can go MIA.
In 2006, the company set course on a new strategy at the Land Rover assembly facility in the British town of Solihull, one of three United Kingdom-based manufacturing sites for the two brands.
When a vehicle at Solihull reaches the end of the assembly process, it exits the track, breaking out of its captive sequence. Under the previous system, that's where visibility began to fade. It wasn't uncommon for plant personnel to lose track of a vehicle as it moved to a temporary resting spot — which could be any number of areas on the 300-acre site — through stations such as wheel alignment, headlamp alignment, paint repair, and water testing.
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