Italian stone products company uses RFID to track product manufacturing and inventory management
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Antolini Luigi & Co. SpA, an Italian manufacturer and wholesaler of granite, marble and other stone products, uses RFID technology to track the production process and location of the 900,000 planed slabs and large stone raw materials the company sells each year. Antolini Luigi’s finished products are sold all over the world and are mainly used for floors or countertops in homes or luxury hotels.
This system uses customized UHF EPC Gen 2 passive RFID tags to increase the accuracy of the company’s inventory by 80% and help employees locate finished slates more easily-some worth $10,000. The company also estimates that due to RFID’s automatic tracking and tracing of products in the factory, many manual steps in the past-such as inventory counting and report filling-have all been automated, thereby reducing labor costs by 40%.
When large pieces of raw materials were transported to the company’s factory in Verona, Italy, workers used adhesive to attach a European standard A4 size label to the stone. The label is covered with a layer of waterproof material, which can be exposed to severe outdoor weather and protect the label from dust and vibration in the working environment of the industrial stone cutting machine. The passive UHF Gen 2 inlay embedded in the tag contains a unique alphanumeric code to identify the slate that flows through each processing stage.
When preparing to process the raw stone, the worker places it at the front of the cutting machine, where a Feig Electronic LRU2000 EPC Gen 2 reader is installed to read the ID code in the tag and send it to the project system integrator FCS Solutions developed software. The software then forwards the ID code to the Antolini production management system-tracking the production of all slates in the factory.
In the factory cutting machine, a locating RFID antenna collects the ID code of the EPC Gen 2 tag of the stones
The machine cuts the big stones into small, planed slabs. The size of these slabs ranges from 90 cm * 155 cm to 205 cm * 340 cm, and the weight mainly depends on the type of stone.
The cut stone slabs are then planed or surface decorated by other machines according to the requirements of the order. After these steps are completed, Antolini workers use an EPC Gen 2 handheld to collect the ID code of the A4 label still affixed to one of the cut slates, and then manually paste an EPC Gen 2 RFID tag on the edge of the single slate. Use the handheld to match the label of the finished slate with the large A4 label of the raw material.
A small EPC Gen 2 RFID tag is attached to the edge of each finished slate
Softwork, the hardware provider of this system, has customized small labels for slate specifically for this application. The label contains Impinj’s Monza 3 chip, and the shell is made of high-density polyethylene to protect them from weather or dust (cut stones are stored outdoors). The label width is less than 1 inch and can be applied to all slate produced in the factory.
The reader software corresponds the ID code of the custom tag with the ID code of the A4 tag, and transfers this data to the production management software through the wireless network, so that the individual slabs always correspond to their raw materials.
The stone slabs are stored in piles on the racks in the storage yard outside the factory. Each rack uses a special EPC Gen 2 label made by Confidex and applied with a metal surface. After the cut slabs are placed on the stack, the staff collects the ID code of the stack and matches it with the ID code of the slab. When a worker needs to take a slate, he can search the ID code of the bracket from the production software.
During the semi-annual stocktaking of stones and slabs (the yard area is about 200,000 square meters), workers use handheld computers to walk to each rack and collect the ID code of each tag. Before the adoption of RFID, it took about two days for two workers to collect ID codes manually. Now it only takes one employee less than three hours to complete an inventory of all stones and slabs. The storage yard holds an average of 30,000 stones and more than 100,000 finished slabs.
Each rack is equipped with customized Confidex labels to identify the position of the rack
When executing orders, Antolini also uses RFID tags to find specific slabs in the yard. Workers learn the stacking location of each slab through the inventory records of the yard management software. When they found the stack, they used a handheld to collect the ID code of the slate, marking that it had been purchased, and the system automatically upgraded the inventory record, showing that the slab had been taken away.
In the early days, Antolini tested barcodes and high-frequency RFID systems, and found that other technologies could not provide the reading distance and stability of UHF systems.
The Norwegian company Minera Norge, which produces ceramic tiles and other related products, also uses RFID and GPS technology to track finished products and transport forklifts.
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