Achieve RFID/ERP Integration

This DoD supplier is integrating its RFID (radio frequency identification) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems to improve business processes and reduce manual labor.

You probably have a mile-long wish list of things you want to do in your supply chain. Think of the bottlenecks you'd open up, the business processes you'd reengineer. What if you had the chance? Wornick Company, a DoD supplier, recently did. The company opened a new plant and used the opportunity to address and solve existing supply chain problems, using the RFID mandate it was under as a catalyst to do so. The result is an integrated and near-fully automated RFID system that has reduced errors and manual labor.

Wornick supplies meals, ready-to-eat (MREs) to the military, producing more than 500 pallets each week. A DoD mandate stated that all cases and pallets had to be shipped with passive RFID-enabled labels and that the military had to be sent advanced shipping notices (ASNs) at the time a shipment left a supplier's facility. Wornick began implementing RFID for compliance only (i.e. not using the data to affect its own operations and keeping the system separate from its ERP and manufacturing systems) at its plant in McAllen, TX. The RFID solution was in place for only four months when Wornick decided to close the plant in McAllen and opening a new plant in Cincinnati. Wornick saw this as an opportunity to design its RFID system from scratch. "At the old plant, we weren't using the information generated by RFID technology for our own benefit – we were just giving it to the military to meet their requirements," says David Hofmeister, CIO of Wornick. "When we moved to a new plant, we decided that we were going to take advantage of RFID and pass the data through to our ERP system."