Like other manufacturers of consumer goods, the Sentry Group Inc., of
Rochester, N.Y., was not immune to the trend started by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. One of its big retail customers followed the giant retailer’s lead and required Sentry to put radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on the pallets containing the safes and other security devices that it produces. The customer was eager to reap the same efficiencies that Wal-Mart expected the technology to generate in its inventory and supply chain management.

Make it pay

The plan for capitalizing upon this opportunity involved mixing RFID with bar codes, playing off the strengths of each. “RFID is not a line-of-sight technology,” notes John DiPalo, senior vice president of product development at Acsis Inc., in
Marlton, N.J., the software vendor that integrated RFID into Sentry’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. “So it provides the most benefit to validate transactions without direct interaction from the user.” For example, a dock fitted with door portals could tell the fork-truck operator that he or she is loading the incorrect pallet onto a truck.

“RFID also shines in its ability to read aggregations of product,” continues DiPalo. It can read all of the tags on the cases on a pallet during stretch wrapping, for example, to validate that the pallet contains the correct products and quantities. Downstream, it also can record and collect the unique serialization of items and cases in the case-to-pallet hierarchy for authenticating and tracking products through the supply chain.

Bar codes don’t need user interaction for validation either, when scanners are mounted on a production line. But besides low cost and the ease of generating labels, bar coding permits users to exploit the various mobile scanning technologies that are available today. “Mobile bar-code transactions provide the added benefit of direct interaction with the user, which provides immediate validation of the product being handled,” says DiPalo.

At Sentry, the solution was to apply RFID case tags to the cartons and use open-air RFID encoding during the serialization process on the packaging line. Having no bar-code printer at this point in the process maximizes efficiency. For pallets, however, the tags are both printed and encoded. Printing the pallet number on the tag provides a back-up bar code and human readable text when an RFID tag becomes unreadable or when exception handling requires a bar code or manual data entry. The mix of technologies improved the accuracy of inventory records and streamlined the movement of product through production and shipping.

Finding RFID Profits

As Sentry and others have proven, manufacturers can profit from RFID, both inside their factories and throughout their supply chains. “By tagging cases, pallets and sometimes individual items, companies will have a more accurate accounting of their inventories,” says Mark DiSera, RFID product manager at vendor Turck Inc., in
Plymouth, Minn. “This will eliminate out-of-stocks because suppliers will know exactly when quantities are running low.”

Another form of inventory control that RFID can provide is the tracking of equipment and other assets, such as forklift trucks and containers. Tagging these assets gives them greater visibility, which is often the first step in getting greater utilization from them. This use of the technology is spreading quickly in the automotive industry, according to DiSera. The automakers, for example, are using RFID tags to track the locations of the expensive racks that carry frames or bodies as they travel through assembly.

Despite the impact that RFID can have on controlling inventories and assets, reaping its full benefits is often not possible until enough operations in a factory or at business partners in a supply ...