Managing Automation
RFID Inside
By Chris Chiappinelli
June 2008

RFID means many things to many people. To some, it's a confusing and unproven technology; to others, it's a boon to operations and the bottom line.

The key to understanding and exploiting RFID, many analysts say, is to start by keeping any deployment closed loop, or confined to the four walls of the plant. Open-looped systems, such as retailer-enforced projects involving multiple locations and affiliated parties, require more sophistication and expense, and don't always lead to a substantial return on investment.

But don't confuse closed-loop with stand-alone. In almost all cases, the RFID system must interact with — indeed, derives its value from interacting with — incumbent technology, such as a manufacturing execution or inventory management system.

A 2007 ARC Advisory study found that more manufacturers are beginning to focus RFID on closed-loop implementations. Thirty-three percent of survey respondents who intended to use RFID planned to use it for fixed asset tracking, 32% for reusable container tracking, 26% for engineered asset tracking, and 16% for tracking IT assets.

In this article, we'll look at three such closed-loop RFID installations and the integration it took to realize their benefits.

Tracking Jaguar/Land Rover

Before Jaguar/Land Rover parted ways with Ford Motor Co. to become part of Tata Motors in March, the company learned a few tricks from its parent.

RFID underlies two important processes at Jaguar/Land Rover. One, an RFID-based materials replenishment system — a version of e-kanban — that the automaker inherited from Ford has earned much attention in recent years for its success in enabling a lean manufacturing environment.

In that process, when a particular component alongside the assembly line is running low, a worker pushes a nearby button that is integrated with an active RFID tag made by WhereNet Corp., a Zebra Technologies company. The tag's signal is picked up by antennae that relay the information to a server, which then translates the button ID into a part number. The integrated system then displays an order on a screen in that component's stock location, where a forklift driver uses a touch screen to print a ticket indicating which part to collect and where on the track to take it.

The e-kanban system nicely complements the company's lean efforts, says Dave O'Reilly, manager of manufacturing and purchasing IT for Jaguar/Land Rover. Based on the data produced by the WhereNet system, plant managers were able to determine the most efficient quantity of components to hold line-side, reduce the overall number of forklift movements, and eventually reduce the number of drivers.

The system made a believer out of O'Reilly, who said that, before its implementation, he thought of RFID as a technology best suited to applications outside the manufacturing arena. "That was our first real insight into, 'Hey, this is clever, this RFID,' " he says.

Approximately two years ago, that insight led to a new directive: Create an RFID-based system that could track finished vehicles once they leave the assembly line, but before they are dispatched for delivery.

For years, Land Rover had played an unwitting game of hide-and-seek with its finished vehicles. On a 300-acre site, even an outsized SUV can go MIA.

In 2006, the company set course on a new strategy at the Land Rover assembly facility in the British town of Solihull, one of three United Kingdom-based manufacturing sites for the two brands.

When a vehicle at Solihull reaches the end of the assembly process, it exits the track, breaking out of its captive sequence. Under the previous system, that's where visibility began to fade. It wasn't uncommon for plant personnel to lose track of a vehicle as it moved to a temporary resting spot — which could be any number of areas on the 300-acre site — through stations such as wheel alignment, headlamp alignment, paint repair, and water testing.

"We'd like to really know where [the vehicles] are ... if we have to prioritize them to recall them for any reason or go and fix them for whatever reason," O'Reilly explains.

For help, he paid another visit to WhereNet, the supplier of the materials replenishment system, and selected its Vehicle Tracking Management System for the job.

Land Rover now associates an active RFID tag with the VIN number of a finished vehicle and then hangs the tag in the cabin of the vehicle. The tag blinks every four minutes, allowing the closest of the 130 antennae on-site to pick up the signal and triangulate its location to within 3 meters.

The success of that system — O'Reilly says it has substantially reduced the amount of time between a vehicle's reaching the end of the production line and its dispatch — has spawned even greater interest in RFID as a mechanism for change at Jaguar/Land Rover.

"The original idea was just, 'Can you help us locate the cars?' " he says. "I think when we talked a little more about this, we suddenly realized we can do more than just locate cars here. We can actually really improve this order-to-cash cycle because the quicker we get the car off plant, the quicker we're going to get revenue back in."

That thinking led to the idea of integrating with other factory systems. "If the RFID system can pick up the vehicle," O'Reilly says, "why can't it also then do a quick check against the quality system to make sure that there are no quality concerns outstanding on this vehicle?"

Those and other projects based on the existing RFID infrastructure should keep O'Reilly and his cohorts busy in the years to come.

"Obviously the challenge for us with change of ownership [to Tata] is that a lot of the systems that we run at Jaguar/Land Rover came from Ford. So they're going to give us all of those systems, which is the nice bit on their behalf," O'Reilly says.

He won't reveal dollar figures when talking about the RFID investment, other than to say it was "quite a bit of money." But he says the payback on the vehicle tracking system came within nine months.

Tooling Around at Lockheed

At five Lockheed Martin manufacturing sites, a new system for tool tracking has brought the aerospace and defense company not only an appreciable financial payback, but, more important, an added measure of confidence in the safety of its products.

At Lockheed's facilities in Palmdale, CA; Marietta, GA; Fort Worth, TX; Meridian, MS; and Clarksburg, WV, RFID-based CribMaster technology from WinWare is helping the aerospace giant to more intelligently construct fighter jets, such as the F35 and the F16, as well as carrier airplanes, such as the C5 and C130.

In each of those plants, Lockheed has installed WinWare toolcribs that use passive RFID tags to log when a tool leaves or returns to its kit, as well as who takes it and where that worker plans to use it. If a tool goes missing, a supervisor can pull up the most recent log for details on where it likely ended up.

The system earns its keep in a myriad of ways, according to Denis Klein, Lockheed's senior manager of production distribution processes. First, it keeps costs in check by preventing the loss of tools. When workers know the system is tracking each tool that they check out — anything from a screwdriver to a wrench to a socket — they're less likely to lose a tool or leave the plant with it.

"We've demonstrated a reduction in lost tools and delinquent tools," Klein says, without quoting dollar figures. But the system's integration into the larger enterprise has created even greater savings, he says.

Prior to the RFID installation, each program within Lockheed was responsible for its own tool purchasing. Under that structure, two separate programs might unknowingly purchase the same toolcrib. The integration of the RFID system across the enterprise allowed Lockheed not only to see that possible redundancy, but also to review the statistics on tool usage to determine whether one crib could be shared among programs.

The same integration that helps Lockheed coordinate tool purchases also facilitated perhaps the greatest benefit of the system, according to Klein. Considering that something as small as a socket, if left inside a plane's wing during assembly, can reduce a billion-dollar jet to rubble, it's little surprise that foreign object debris keeps defense contractors up at night.

A primary goal of deploying the RFID-based technology, Klein says, was "the creation of a system that allows us to provide a higher level of confidence that we're not leaving something in an airplane that's going to be pulling the turns with the G-forces that these aircraft do."

The integrated CribMaster RFID system allows workers to check in tools somewhere other than their point of origin — in another building, for instance. The system identifies the tool as safe and secured, and pings the appropriate personnel to collect and return the tool to its home. Creating that level of visibility in the previously manual world of tool tracking would have been difficult.

Klein also anticipates a reduction in maintenance time and costs with the wireless tool-dispensing technology.

With much success already in hand, Lockheed is contemplating extending the RFID tracking program to other sites and other company lines.

Viracon's Looking Glass

For tracking materials, tools, or other factory assets that move in predictable patterns or have a home base, passive tags often suffice, experts say. Conversely, for assets that roam far and wide — the interlopers of the factory world — active or WiFi-based RFID often does the trick.

WiFi-based RFID appeals to some manufacturers, particularly those that have installed WiFi for enterprise-level communications. For them, the prospect of extending that technology to the plant is more appealing than installing a duplicate, traditional RFID infrastructure of readers and antennae.

Viracon, a glass fabricator that will be outfitting New York's Freedom Tower, and the largest division of $750 million parent company Apogee Enterprises, Inc., has the unenviable task of keeping tabs on thousands of sheets of glass as they move through a highly customized manufacturing process that is less assembly line and more "a free flow of product going from one process to the next," says Matt Miesner, a management trainee at Apogee and a Six Sigma blackbelt.

After a couple of Six Sigma project reviews showed the need for better traceability of work in process and of the assets used to shepherd that work through the fabrication process — in this case, metal carriers — Viracon decided to integrate WiFi into its plant and use it as an RFID infrastructure.

Prior to the RFID rollout, Viracon workers conducted manual scans on the carriers that transported the glass. That location was fed into an inventory tracking system. If a worker missed a scan, however, the system lost track of the carrier. And that led to wasted time and money required to track down those assets.

"With the active RFID, that step can be completely eliminated from the process," says Todd Schelling, special projects manager at Viracon.

Instead, the AeroScout active RFID tags on each of the facility's 6,000 carriers send out a radio signal at regular intervals, allowing the WiFi access points to triangulate their positions based on the signal's strength. AeroScout's Mobile View software translates that location onto a computerized map for a forklift driver, for instance, or another worker trying to locate the proper carrier for his or her next job.

That one process change has created a windfall of benefits for the company. Under the old system, its data showed, workers found a carrier 60% of the time. With the RFID system in place, the success rate has improved to 100%.

"That 40% of the time turned into extra time wasted by our people, plus extra scrap reordered through the system because we simply weren't able to find the glass, [which] just snowballs into other problems," including stunted throughput and a more congested work area, Miesner explains. "It's pretty incredible to just be able to type in the carrier that you want and walk right up to it."

Although they won't reveal numbers, Viracon representatives admit that the WiFi-based RFID project was a costly investment. Miesner and Schelling, the project leads, say a pilot rollout of the system earlier this year — and some exhaustive due diligence on the resulting data — gave them all the ammunition they needed to get the RFID funding.

"It wasn't really that difficult once we did a full cost benefit analysis on how much it may cost us to not have this solution."

With a full rollout of the project completed in April 2008, the company is confident that it will see a return on that output within 12 months.

A Tool to Build on

In assessing the RFID project at Viracon, Miesner hit on an elemental truth: "It really was a foundational problem that we needed to address," he says. In its most basic plant application, RFID is not a glittery add-on, but a way for companies to solve core operational challenges by gaining visibility into some of their blind spots.

As for how to get started, Jaguar/Land Rover's O'Reilly offers some advice. First, he says, find a trusted technology partner with a track record of successful RFID implementations. "Then go and have a look at where it's been put in at other sites... and make sure you fully understand how they went about installing it," he says. Once a manufacturer has gained confidence with the technology, it may be wise to shop around a bit, he says.

When it's done right and integrated into existing systems to a company's advantage, an RFID project can give plant management valuable insight and ease the burden on workers.

"I've been with the company a significant amount of time, and I've never seen a group of individuals more excited about a program," says Viracon's Schelling. "All we hear is 'How soon can we get this up and going?' "