one end of the 66-door facility, where the goods can be
held at the appropriate temperature until it’s time for outbound loading.
One of the decisions the company faced early on was how
to track the goods held in the temporary storage facility.
H&M Bay wanted a system that would not only allow it to
locate the goods quickly but also enable it to track how
much time they spent in storage and when they were
shipped out. After weighing a number of options, H&M
Bay settled on RFID.
For a fast-paced operation like H&M Bay’s, RFID offers a
number of advantages over other data-collection methods.
For one thing, there’s the technology’s extended read range.
With RFID, there’s no need for
lift truck drivers to climb down off
their vehicles to scan a pallet’s label
the way they would with, say, bar
codes. They simply pick up the
load and drive past a reader that
automatically captures data from
the pallet’s tag. For another,
there’s the technology’s speed
and flexibility. RFID not only
provides high read rates but
also allows for multiple tags to
be read simultaneously.
Rapid readers
Working with its integrator, Franwell Inc. of Lakeland, Fla.,
H&M Bay designed a system that’s easy to use but still provides all the tracking data it needs. As a truck arrives, workers wheel a portable cart to the dock door. The cart holds a
Datamax printer that creates two 4- by 8-inch passive RFID
labels containing information about the product—the
order number, the shipper, the number of cases on the pallet, the shipping destination, and the truck on which it will
eventually be loaded. One RFID label is applied to the top
of the pallet, while the other goes on the front. The lift truck
then takes the load and drops it at either the cooler entrance
or the freezer entrance.
From there, one of three reach trucks retrieves the pallet
for putaway in the appropriate storage area. Each of these
reach trucks is outfitted with a Motorola RD5000 RFID
reader mounted on its forks. The reader is tethered to a
Motorola VC5090 mobile computer on board the vehicle.
As the truck picks up the load, its reader automatically captures the data from the pallet’s front tag and transmits it to
the onboard computer. The computer, in turn, transmits
the data to the company’s customized inventory system.
As the reach truck enters a cold room, an overhead
Motorola XR Series RFID reader retrieves the information
from the pallet’s top tag. That information is then relayed to
the inventory system to let it know that the product is now
located in either the cooler or the freezer and is not still sitting in a staging area or on the dock.
The storage area features 1,000 pallet positions within
five levels of racking. To expedite the putaway process,
H&M Bay’s RFID system allows drivers to decide where to
deposit their loads (usually at the closest available position)
rather than sending them to a pre-assigned location. This
saves valuable time because it eliminates the need for drivers to consult a sheet or display screen to find out where
they’re supposed to put the pallet and then search among
the racks for the correct slot.
As the driver places a load onto a rack, the lift truck’s
reader captures the location data from a tag permanently
attached to the rack’s inside upright. The onboard computer then displays the location and
asks the driver to confirm the
information. This assures complete accuracy, although the
company says that because of
the way the system is set up—
with tags permanently mounted on the racks’ metal interior
and a configuration that allows
for adjustments to the scanners’
read range—there’s little chance
that a neighboring tag will be
read in error.
Once the driver has confirmed the position,
the inventory system is updated again with the pallet’s
new location. If customers wish, they can log onto H&M
Bay’s system to confirm that their product is safely in cold
storage.
When loading begins on Saturday, the reach truck drivers
are handed a list of pallets to pull from the racks. As the
drivers exit the cooler or freezer areas with their loads, the
interrogator positioned above the door reads the tags, and
the system is updated to show they’re no longer in cold
storage. The pallets are then whisked to the appropriate
staging area for loading onto outbound trucks.
Need for speed
As for how the RFID tracking system has been working out,
H&M Bay reports that the technology has allowed it to keep
precise track of each product’s location with no slowdown
in the workflow. On top of that, the company estimates that
it has saved about 25 percent in labor costs compared with
other types of data-collection methods. Drivers do not have
to leave their vehicles to scan a bar code or enter location
information into a computer terminal, which expedites the
loading and unloading process. And because drivers are free
to choose storage locations, they don’t have to waste time
trying to find pre-assigned positions.
“Everything happens so quickly here,” says John Walker,
H&M Bay’s software development manager. “In our operations, it is up to the guys on the fork trucks to manage the
process. With the RFID setup, we have a mobile system that
allows them to do the transactions quickly.”
