L-Tron technology partner Zebra Technologies announced its Rack & Container management system at the Automotive Manufacturing Solutions conference held in September 2013 in Detroit. The new manufacturing-execution system was specifically designed to assist automotive manufacturers to track the “location, status, condition and history of each reusable rack and container within the automotive supply chain.”
Loss and damage of racks and containers is a multi-million dollar problem for the automotive industry. Zebra’s Rack & Container solution combines both radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology and real-time locating systems (RTLS) to deliver precise data on the current location and condition of each rack or container as it is transferred through manufacturing processes.
Zebra’s Material Flow software is the application foundation of the new R&C management system. The Material Flow application has long been deployed for tracking components assembled in automotive plants, such as in the GETRAG Ford Transmission plant in Cologne, Germany, so leveraging it to also track the valuable racks and containers the industry uses for transportation of such components is a natural extension of that proven technology. (For reference, the GETRAG plant attributed a 20% improvement in labor productivity, 1/3 reduction in forklift trips, a $750,000 savings in the costs of carrying inventory and “a near complete elimination of downtime due to parts shortages” to Zebra’s Material Flow system.)
Key benefits of Zebra’s Rack & Container tracking solution include:
- Reduction of unscheduled production changes: Unexpected shortages of these key resources are avoided.
- Reduction of downstream interruptions: A natural consequence of reducing upstream production changes.
- Elimination of regular manual audits: The system automates real-time reporting of rack and container inventories, eliminating time- and labor-wasting manual counts.
- Elimination of wasteful search time: With Material Flow providing real-time location data for all racks and containers, physical searches are eliminated.
- Minimization of parts and component damage: When they know the real-time location and condition of all racks and containers, employees needn’t resort to using damaged or out-of-spec units.
Deployed technologies include barcode scanning, plus passive and active RFID, as appropriate to the specific plant environment. The result is a comprehensive system that adds unit-level visibility to the entire rack and container inventory to facilitate location of all assets as well as determination of the condition of those assets. More on Zebra’s Rack & Container management system is available here and here.