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Troy Design & Manufacturing (TDM) is expanding the use of RFID solutions at its Chicago facility to reduce the labor hours employees spend manually counting work-in-progress. TDM management said that in the three years since the program was deployed, the company has saved a lot of time and employees can focus on high-value work.
When the Chicago factory officially started production in 2011, the RFID solution in the factory included a passive UHF system provided by Lowry,RFIDReader, RFID middleware provided by Australian company 7iD. TDM’s Chicago plant produces 150 Ford Explorers and Ford-branded police cars a day.
Since 2011, Ford’s vehicles have been put into police use. So Ford created TDM to speed up vehicle production. TDM needs to track each vehicle in real time on four assembly lines, each of which has about 10 processes.
Due to customer requirements, the process parameters of each vehicle are different, and the process personnel need to distinguish the process of each vehicle. In the past, when using a value-only system, operators needed to look up the specific process required on a book based on a paper order form. TDM manager Lee Murray said previous staff had spent a lot of time on this. So the company experimented with QR code technology. But the test proved that this is also inefficient, because the staff need to put down the work they are doing when scanning the barcode.
This RFID solution consists of a Motorola FX9500 installed in 40 processesReader, each reader has 4 AN200 antennas. The WIP manufacturing software provided by Lowry manages this collected data. Since the middleware of 7iD works well in the Cologne Ford plant, TDM also chose this product this time.
First, TDM issues production orders based on the order. As each vehicle arrives, TDM employees use Zebra R110xi4 RFID printers to print and paste 4×6-inch RFID tags. Attached to the back of the car’s windshield, the tag corresponds to a unique ID number containing information such as a bill of materials and a vehicle identification number (VIN).
When the vehicle reaches a certain process, the reader will automatically read the tag and display the operation instructions on the screen. Then, the operator only needs to operate according to the on-screen prompts. “I hope the operator can do something valuable. That’s what this solution can bring us,” Murray said.
At the same time, managers can also obtain the time spent in each process and the status at a certain moment.
The reader also automatically reads the RFID tag and changes the software information when the vehicle leaves the factory after assembly. In this way, TDM companies have real-time visibility into production progress and status.
By using this technique, Murray says, an average of 5-11 seconds per process is saved. At the same time, this also exceeded the company’s expectations.
In the future, TDM also hopes to use RFID technology in other places. For example, operators can also enjoy the benefits of RFID when the vehicle leaves the assembly line and is in vinyl wrap (a method of painting cars). By the end of this year, the RFID readers at these stations will be installed, Murray said.
Motorola’s RFID readers are being used for WIP management in automotive, electronics repair and consumer durables manufacturing, said Mark Wheeler, manager of Motorola Solutions’ industrial solutions division. “We found that these solutions improved the accuracy of work-in-progress data, reduced labor time, and improved output efficiency,” he said.
(The exclusive manuscript of rfid world network, please indicate the source author for reprinting!)
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