Articles
Electric Lift Trucks Take Advantage Of RFID
November 16, 2006
•Case Study: Crown Equipment
It became apparent to Crown that there must be a better way to manage indirect materials than what was currently in place. Brenda Hughes, Supervisor and Buyer for Crown Equipment noted, "We really needed to get product to the operators on the machines. We felt our replenishment was effective, but unavailability for all three shifts was hurting production." Crown, being the forward-thinking organization that they are, began to look at RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) to help with their indirect material challenges.
Being a manufacturer of lift trucks, RFID had certainly been on Crown's radar screen. The benefits to material handling and logistics operations have been becoming more and more obvious. But with the growing industry buzz around RFID, Crown began to investigate the possibility of expanding their RFID use to manage indirect materials and solving the challenge of providing 24-hour access.
Conceptually, Crown believed with RFID its employees could simply walk in a crib, pick up their supplies, and get back to work. Was this possible? Their research uncovered the CribMaster Accu-Port, which is a commercial off the shelf (COTS) inventory management system geared specifically for managing indirect materials. CribMaster has partnered with Symbol Technologies to provide the antennae and readers to power the Accu-Port and have designed a plug-n-play portal specifically for managing indirect materials. The system utilizes passive RFID technology and Gen2 passive tags.
Click Here To Download:•Case Study: Crown Equipment
