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Kimberly-Clark (KC), a manufacturer of packaged retail consumer goods, is about to complete a pilot project. The project uses passive EPC Gen 2 radio frequency tags to track the location of finished goods and raw material transport vehicles in a manufacturing plant on SCBeech Island. The experiment was very successful, according to Corey Mingerink, the company’s senior radio frequency packaging engineer.
KC’s manual tracking system requires workers to spend up to three hours to locate a specific transport vehicle in the Beech Island area. There are 5 separate transport truck parking stations in the Beech Island area. However, at present, it only takes a few minutes to locate a transport vehicle using radio frequency systems. From the perspective of saving labor and improving productivity, Mingerink said that the investment in KC technology is obviously profitable, and this has been widely recognized.
Mingerink said that when it started looking for a better way to manage transport vehicles, the company deliberately avoided using active real-time positioning systems, even though such applications of this system are currently widely used. “Overview of the market, we chose PINC Solution. This company combines passive radio frequency technology with global positioning technology.” Mingerink told the attendees at the radio frequency weekly LIVE! conference held in Las Vegas last month “This is the best example of the integration of multiple technologies. The integration of passive technology and positioning technology will avoid the need for active radio frequency tags.”
kc is currently using the Yard Hound truck tracking platform provided by PINC Solution in Berkeley, California. The company installs passive EPC Gen 2 radio frequency tags on 900 transport vehicles in the factory at a specific time and uses a network of fixed and movable readers to identify these transport vehicles.
Although this experiment will continue for several months as planned, Mike O’Shea, KC’s director of automatic identification sensing technology, said that in fact, it has entered the company’s permanent deployment. He said after the LIVE! conference, “Except for some grassroots jobs that are not directly related to PINC technology in the factory, other KC fields are competing for who is the first to use this technology.”
The PINC solution has three components, and KC currently applies all these three components. The Yard Hound Guard (watchdog) application system is installed on the safety entrance and exit lanes of the factory. This application system consists of a fixed EPC Gen 2 reader and PINC software running on the guard’s computer. When the truck enters the factory with a trailer about to be unhooked, the passive EPC Gen 2 tag in a hard plastic rack uses the magnetic effect of the tag to protect the trailer. The fixed reader will read the identification number embedded in the tag and use the PINC software to combine it with the existing factory management software obtained from KC. When the trailer is later towed out of the factory, the tag will be read again and then removed, so that the tag can be reused on other trailers that enter.
The Yard Hound Locator application system is used to track and locate tagged trailers in the factory. The radio frequency reader is placed in the tracking application system of PINC, and the tracking application system is installed in the factory truck (also known as the intermodal truck) and used to change the position of the trailer. When the truck drove through the entire business premises, it would pass through the area within the range of each stationary trailer tag. Its tracking application system will then collect the ID data on the tag and match it with the location. The location information is obtained by the receiver of the internal positioning system.
Because the truck is in motion, the tracker also contains inertial sensors. Inertial sensors are used to measure the acceleration and rotation characteristics of the truck. Bringing this data, together with the strength of the tag reading signal into the algorithm developed by PINC, can accurately locate the location of each trailer.
The tracker will store the location data and time stamp of the trailer. As long as the device enters the Wi-Fi (802.11) contact point range of any factory, the tracker will transmit the information to the PINC network software platform. The PINC server collects the data of multiple arriving factory trucks and displays it on the factory floor map to present a real-time image of the factory’s internal activities.
In every truck, the driver uses Yard Hound Director software. This software runs on a touch screen monitor and receives commands such as which trailer to tow and where to transport. Based on the data obtained from the tracker, the Director software guides the driver to find the specific location of each trailer. When the truck has passed all the tagged trailers, the tracker can continue to record.
“KC has clearly demonstrated its value since we started labeling trailers” Mingerink told attendees. He added that he does not believe that end users need to have a factory as large as KC in order to benefit from the PINC solution. profit. “You don’t need to own too many trailers.”
In addition, the feature of visualizing the location of trucks in the PINC system and the statistics of the number of trailers moved by the driver during the average working hours enable Kc’s driver and employee placement work to be more accurate. Previously, Mingerink said that Beech Island’s manager relied on a recommendation letter from a third-party post company to contract with the truck driver to arrange shifts.
The PINC solution currently has many other customers using its Yard Hound system, including Cost Plus World Market, a retail store that specializes in selling household goods.
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