Cable manufacturers use RFID to locate assets, greatly shortening product search time

In the last step of production, the cables are wound onto cable drums and placed in the warehouse, and then individually wound onto smaller drums for shipment according to customer orders. Some products will be Stored in indoor warehouses, but some cables can be stored outdoors. For Keystone Cable's warehousing department, this storage method virtually expands the scope of the warehouse, so staff spend 30 to 45 minutes each time time to find the product.

Derek Zhu, senior strategy manager at Keystone Cable, said: "Our workers spend a lot of time looking for products every day, which leads to inefficiencies throughout the organization. Although we try to label each roll as much as possible, we are never able to accurately locate the rolls. position, because the cable drum is often moved when reeling in and releasing cable, so it is not possible to set a specific position for each drum.”

The Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), provided Keystone Cable with a solution that can improve the efficiency of the tracking process.

SIMTech has developed an innovative application based on the Android smart system to automatically identify cable drums and determine their location through passive RFID tags. Keystone Cable first started by dividing factory areas and warehouse areas, and each area was assigned a unique identification code. Then deploy and install Xerafy Data Trak II tags for each specific storage area to determine a permanent location ID for each area. At the same time, Keystone Cable installed Data Trak II tags on more than 500 cable drums in the factory. Each tag has a unique serial number to identify the drum. In other words, 2 labels are used to identify and locate a roll, so workers do not have to worry about the reading and writing directions of the labels when storing the rolls.

The label used to record the location is installed on the iron rack where the roll is stored; the label recording the roll number is installed at the bottom of the roll.

Xerafy Data Trak II

Data Trak II comes from the Xerafy Trak series and is positioned to provide cost-effective RFID solutions for areas such as logistics warehousing, IT Asset MANAGEMENT and financial services. The ability of tags to be read and written on metal surfaces is key to Keystone Cable's RFID applications, because cable reels are stored on metal shelves, and ordinary tags cannot be read or written in such an environment.

An Android-based application and a web-based location database developed by the Institute of Manufacturing Technology in Singapore can track and locate all tagged cable drums. When a staff member discovers that a reel has been moved, he only needs to use an Android smartphone with an ARETE POP RFID reading and writing plug-in to scan the tag located in the area, and the RFID will automatically update the position of the cable reel in the system. Information, the whole process only takes a few seconds. Compared with the search time of half an hour in the past, Keystone Cable's management efficiency has been greatly improved.

“The performance of the Xerafy tags throughout the project has been outstanding. Even though the reels and shelves are made of metal, the tags are not affected at all and the reading and writing process is smooth. Now we only need to enter the number of the cable reel, The corresponding location information will be displayed on the handheld device. What used to take half an hour to do now doesn’t even take 5 minutes.”