technologyreview
says instead of taking half an hour, it
now takes about five minutes to
record the arrival of inventory and
update the inventory status on the
portal.
TAG TEAMS
Currently, about 25 of Ingersoll
Rand’s 110 suppliers are tagging their
shipments. These include several
local Texan and Mexican suppliers as
well as vendors who feed products
through a consignment warehouse in
Tyler operated by a third-party logis-
tics company (3PL). Under this
arrangement, vendors send trailer
Dependable.
Actually, the dog ran away. But the operations manager was
free to go door-to-door with the knowledge that his Printronix
printing system was always up to the job. Our family of line
matrix, thermal and RFID printers and related products set a
If only all things, like the family dog,
were nearly as dependable.
loads of product to the consignment warehouse, which, in turn, sends smaller lots of
parts and components to the factory upon
request. Typically, it applies the RFID tags
to items just prior to shipping.
Not all of the shipments from these vendors are suitable for tagging, however.
Some items—like shipments of metals or
components that arrive in metal tubs—
aren’t being tagged because metal can
interfere with the signal transmission. “The
tag itself is an antenna, and when you
touch metal, you can short out the antenna,” Smith explains.
Shipments that aren’t suitable for tagging are recorded the traditional way—by
scanning a bar code. All incoming materials—including those with RFID labels—
still carry a bar code because Ingersoll
Rand requires them for auditing purposes.
As for the project’s cost, Ingersoll Rand
got off lightly. The company already had
antennas on hand that it had purchased for
another project but never used. As a result,
Smith says, setting up the receiving dock to
read RFID tags only cost it $20,000.
The suppliers bear the cost of the tags,
which Smith says run to about a dime
apiece. So far, none of the suppliers have
balked at the requirement, he says. That’s
because the suppliers have an incentive—
prompt payment for their materials. Once
the information from the tag gets sent to
the portal and is reconciled with the
invoice, the supplier gets approved for payment. “If the suppliers do the job right with
RFID, they get paid on time,” Smith says.
Ingersoll Rand is reaping savings as
well. For instance, the automatic recording process has enabled it to reassign two
receiving workers to other tasks. Overall,
Smith estimates that the RFID implementation will save the company something
on the order of $120,000 a year.
Printers shown:
T5000r Thermal Bar Code Printer P7000 Cartridge Line Matrix Printer
©2011 Printronix
www.printronix.com | 1.800.665.6210
MORE RFID IN THE FUTURE
Next year, Ingersoll Rand plans to extend
the use of RFID to all members of its supply base as well as to additional manufacturing plants. It also wants to begin tagging individual items—as opposed to
boxes or entire trailerloads—to achieve
unit-level visibility. “We want to be able to
see each and every component and manage all those components,” Smith says. ;
