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Colmobil, Israel’s largest car importer, is now using a set of RFID systems provided by BOS to reduce labor and speed up the process of picking up cars from parking lots in the country’s two major ports. Colmobil imports 25,000-35,000 cars each year-manufactured by Mercedes Benz, Mitsubishi Motors, Mitsubishi Fuso and Hyundai-and sells these cars to 1,500 dealers in Israel.
Imported cars are transported into the ports of Eilat and Ashdod and stored in the open parking area of the port for a month or more. When Colmobil sells a new car, the car can be picked up from the port parking lot after paying the car tariff and shipped to a company’s car inspection point (PDI). In the port parking lot, a piece of paper is pasted on the left rear seat window of each vehicle, and the vehicle identification number (VIN) is printed in the form of text and barcode as vehicle identification.
Eilat port parking lot
However, there are several problems with this process. Employees must pass through the parking lot in order to locate a particular vehicle-there are approximately 37,000 parking spaces, and they are often full. The employee must look up the paper attached to the vehicle to identify the desired vehicle. However, the printed text on a sheet of paper often fades in a high temperature environment. Colmobil Chief Technology Officer Gil Katz said that when the external temperature reaches 43 degrees Celsius and the temperature inside the vehicle reaches 80 degrees Celsius, the text will fade within a few weeks.
The new system installed in March 2009 made vehicle identification easier, the company said. When the car is unloaded from the ship, each new car is permanently installed with a 3/4-inch * 3/4-inch UPM Raflatac EPC Gen 2 passive UHF RFID tag. Colmobil employees use handheld devices provided by BOS, including an Intermec CN3 handheld computer, an Intermec IP30 RFID reader and a Motorola Symbol LS2208 barcode scanner. According to Uzi Parizat, deputy sales director of BOS, the system first scans the VIN barcode on the window paper and the RFID tag on the windshield of the vehicle, and associates the VIN with the tag ID code in the Colmobil back-end database. When the vehicle is parked in the parking lot, the company worker reads the tag again and enters its location number (parking space identification code). The data is then transferred to Colmobil’s SAP back-end system via a GPRS cellular connection.
When a customer orders a car, Colmobil uses software to store the VIN code to obtain data about the car’s location in the parking lot. The worker then came to the parking lot and used the handheld to confirm the correctness of the car before picking up the car. Then the vehicle is taken from the parking lot and the truck is carried to the PDI point.
When the vehicle arrives at a PDA point in Colmobil for final correction, safety inspection and car registration, workers unload the vehicle from the truck and use a handheld RFID reader to read the RFID tag on the windshield. The car is then parked or moved through various processes, the tags are read one by one in each process, the information is input into the handheld, and the back-end system upgrades the state of the car. In this way, Colmobil can understand the status of each vehicle.
After adopting this system, Katz said, “locating vehicles at ports, delivering vehicles and managing PDI is faster and easier than before.” Although it is too early to determine how much labor will be reduced by this system, he said, it takes only 4 hours to count vehicles in PDI or ports, compared to the previous manual method that required two days.
The next stage of the application of this system is to help Colmobil speed up the removal of vehicles from the port parking lot-this requires formal approval from the Port Authority. When the truck leaves the parking lot, the driver must provide the cargo manifest, customer release slip, and port tickets. The port staff must confirm the VIN number listed in all these documents.
“Traditionally, the vehicle verification process requires supervisors to climb onto the truck and check the window sticker or the VIN code engraved on the vehicle chassis,” Katz explained. Once this system has been approved for installation by the Port Authority, RFID scanners installed on two 6-meter-high poles on both sides of the exit can complete most of the current manual work. The truck will pass through the RFID door, the tag ID code will be read and sent to the back-end system via a cable connection, and the supervisor will obtain the information on the computer for electronic confirmation.
Colmobil also provides vehicle maintenance and repair services to car buyers. The company also hopes to adopt a system to notify the service center of the arrival of the vehicle and identify the vehicle, so as to provide customers with personalized services.
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