Freightliner-Western Star: Controlling the Choke Points

Freightliner-Western Star, the best-selling brand of heavy-duty Class 8 trucks in North America, affirmed its commitment to innovation and technology through the deployment of a world class RFID solution to track inventory replenishment throughout its manufacturing facility located in Portland, Oregon.

Totes with tags at portal

Freightliner-Western Star's management team, headed by Plant Automation Project Manager, Louis Fleischer, was looking for a way to accurately and automatically track parts movement from inventory to the factory floor. The process called for parts needed on the production line to be put into inventory totes, placed on mobile tugs (approximately six or seven per tug) and then transferred onto the Shop Floor. The empty totes are returned to the warehouse in groups of 10 to 12 per tug for replenishment. The Portland facility utilizes approximately 750 totes in five different sizes. The previous method of tracking the parts was labor intensive from a data collection and data input standpoint, as well as beset with erroneous data.

Process Review

Compsee, Inc., a leading Solutions Integrator, along with its RFID Solutions Partner, System Concepts, Inc., were called upon, and an engineering study was commissioned for the Portland Plant. The study involved:

• Interviewing management and line personnel,
• A review of business processes,
• Defining issues and concerns,
• Researching the physics of the areas designated as collection points,
• Identification of logistical implications regarding the inventory totes and tugs that would carry the inventory,
• Exploring methods of interfacing to the company's existing database.

Solution

The study identified choke points (portals) utilized to track transactions in and out of the inventory warehouse. As each tote and tug (identified with RFID tags) moves through a portal, the movement breaks a sensor and triggers a Motorola RFID reader to read any tags within the portal. A transaction record is written to the Freightliner SQL database on the corporate server detailing the location, date, and time the transaction occurred and the tote(s) and tug information identified in the portal. Compsee/System Concepts recommended the RFID solution utilizing:

• System Concepts' TraxWare® Software Suite – modular software products used for RFID applications in manufacturing & industrial control, asset tracking, and EPC/DoD compliance opportunities.
• Motorola/Symbol's RFID hardware solutions incorporating the XR-400 series RFID readers and industrial antennas.
• Metal mount RFID tags attached to the tugs: The tags were encoded with the EPC Standards' Global Returnable Asset Identifier (GRAI) format that is intended for assignment to individual objects (totes and tugs) and is the corporate standard for tote/tug identification.
• A paper RFID 4" x 6" smart label is attached to each tote (one side and one front) to provide as much tag exposure to the scanning portals. The GRAI format was also used.
• Compsee supplied printers with Freightliner software connected to the SQL database to provide transaction "receipts."

Insights

Louis Fleischer, Plant Automation-Project Manager, affirms that the key to this success RFID solution deployment was the development of the business case for Supply Chain Management (SCM) material visibility, coupled with the architecture selection for data integration into the current enterprise system.

Mr. Fleischer's deployment started with a Proof of Concept (POC) design for an RFID Solution solving problems within their existing supply chain rather then propose it as an isolated application. RFID was introduced as a comprehensive tool effectively integrating with the existing technology used at the Portland plant. Mr. Fleischer challenged his team to look beyond the RFID hype, and understand where RFID could be used effectively in their business environment. It was a team effort that spanned all departments that created a successful deployment.

"At this point in the evolution of data collection technology, a closed-loop challenge is where radio frequency identification really excels, " says L. Allen Bennett, President and CEO of System Concepts, Inc. "Working with Freightliner-Western Star and its engineers who had this vision, this project was the perfect match for us. When you use the right hardware, with our software, select the right RFID tags and labels to match the environment, and the knowledge to use them correctly, it's easy to solve these types of challenges."

Visit Compsee at www.compse.com and Systems Concepts at www.sysconcepts.com.