Singaporean manufacturer Keystone Cable uses RFID to efficiently manage work-in-progress inventory

Keystone Cable is a Singapore-based company that provides electrical cables for construction facilities, oil and gas and data communications. It manufactures thousands of different products at its Singapore factory, serving customers throughout Singapore. To the untrained eye, cables often look very similar, but there are dozens of product variations based on differences in core wires, insulation materials, and other components.

       “The Xerafy tags worked great on this project. Even though the cable drum and storage racks are metal, the Xerafy tags responded well to the RFID Reader. Now we just enter the cable drum number into the smart device and it Display the corresponding location of the cable tray. This process used to sometimes take 30 to 45 minutes, but now it takes less than 5 minutes." - Derek Zhu, Senior Strategy Manager at Keystone Cable

       Identifying and tracking products has always been a challenge until RFID systems featuring Xerafy tags provided the basis for precise location management. At the end of the production process, the finished product is wound onto large cable drums and placed in the warehouse. To fulfill customer orders, cables are spooled from large cable drums onto smaller cable drums before being delivered to the customer. Depending on the product, the cable reels can be Stored indoors or outdoors, so there are thousands of potential storage locations in a facility of more than 100,000 square feet, which often results in it taking 30 to 45 minutes to find the right cable reel to fill an order.

       “Our factory employees spend a lot of time throughout the day looking for specific cable reels, making the entire process inefficient,” Derek said. “Although all cable reels are marked, the location of each cable reel is not easily traceable. The reels are constantly moving during the rewinding and recoil process, making it difficult to place each cable reel in a specific location." Keystone Cable wanted a more efficient tracking process and turned to the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech) for help, The institute is a research institute of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

       An innovative application has been developed that runs on Android smartphones and uses passive RFID technology to automatically identify cable drums and their locations. Keystone Cable first divided its factory into operating and storage areas and assigned them unique identification numbers. Hundreds of Xerafy Data Trak II electronic tags were then installed at the storage location to provide a permanent location ID. In addition, encoded and uniquely serialized Data Trak II tags were applied to more than 500 cable drums to provide permanent item identification. Each reel is labeled with two labels, one on each end, so material handlers don't have to worry about orientation when placing the cable reels in the warehouse.

       Data Trak II comes from Xerafy’s Trak family of products, which were developed to provide logistics, warehousing, IT and financial services customers with a cost-effective option for deploying RFID on any Asset with high performance and reliability. Read performance on metal is critical for Keystone Cable because its cable drums are stored on metal racks.

      Created an Android app and web-based location database to track cable reels. Whenever the cable drum is moved, the operator will use an Android phone with the ARETE mobile POP plug-in RFID reader function to read the information of the location tag and the ID tag of the cable drum. After the information is read, the cable drum is automatically updated. location in the database. When Keystone Cable needed to find a cable drum to fulfill an order, using RFID to record the item's location took just seconds, saving a lot of time.