Indian tobacco manufacturer ITC uses RFID system to control tobacco humidity
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In order to ensure the quality of tobacco products, ITC, India’s largest tobacco cigarette exporter, must monitor the humidity of tobacco at every stage of production (from raw materials to finished products). Usually during processing, staff at the ITC Calcutta factory have to weigh samples of tobacco and manually record the results on paper labels. Eight months ago, the company introduced a set of RFID systems, which greatly simplified the operation process of humidity monitoring and reduced the manual labor hours of production operators by 40%, said Durga M. Dash, ITC quality control manager.
Tobacco humidity control is the most important thing in cigarette manufacturing, because tobacco must reach a certain low humidity level before it can be used to make cigarettes. To ensure that the tobacco reaches this humidity level, the product must be heated and weighed repeatedly during processing. The humidity level is recorded by testing tobacco samples, weighing them manually and recording the results on paper labels. The paper label goes through the entire production process along with the sample.
At the end of each working day, the label data of about 400 samples were manually entered into the Excel table for data analysis.The results of the analysis can be used not only to ensure the quality of tobacco, but also to find machines that may cause excessive humidity
However, the company explained that the manual data recording and input process is too slow and error-prone; sometimes there are situations such as missing labels, manual data filling errors, or data input errors.
The RFID system currently used by ITC is designed, developed and integrated by TCS. After adopting this system, when the tobacco arrived in the warehouse, the staff quickly collected test samples of this batch of tobacco and stored them in a palm-sized plastic cylindrical container. A paper label is affixed to the container, and the label contains a passive 13.56 MHz TI RFID label; the RFID label conforms to the ISO 15693 standard and has 1 kilobyte of readable and writable memory. Paper tags and RFID tags are both high temperature resistant and waterproof design.
Warehouse staff use a Psion Teklogix handheld reader to write data into the RFID tag of the plastic container. The staff selects the location of the tobacco in the factory, the original place of production, the processing machine to be used, the date and time according to the pull-down menu of the reader. The label will also store the results of each process and each weighing of the sample.
The staff took the plastic container of each sample to one of the three workstations. Each workstation contains a balance, which is connected to an RFID reader and located under an antenna of the reader. The plastic container is placed on the balance, while an empty, heat-resistant, labeled metal container is also placed under an independent antenna. The reader reads the ID number and weight of the RFID tag on the plastic container and writes it into the RFID tag of the metal container. The tag itself has stored the weight of the empty container. Then transfer the tobacco sample from the plastic container to the metal container; after weighing again, put the metal container with the sample and the batch of tobacco into an oven.
After four hours of baking in a 110-degree oven, the staff took out the container with the sample and the remaining tobacco. The container is weighed again, the new weight is recorded on the RFID tag, and the reader reads all the data stored in the tag. This information is uploaded to the company’s back-end data via a wired connection so that ITC can evaluate the results of tobacco processing.
The RFID system has changed the way that tobacco sample data is recorded. ITC can not only abandon low-quality labels, but also save time in collecting samples. According to ITC, the RFID system makes tobacco humidity control more precise and reliable.
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