Cost Reductions In The Chemical Industry By RFID-Based Tracing Of Production Tools

Evonik is one of the world's leading suppliers for high-quality raw additive materials and pharmaceutical ingredients for different applications in the area of skin and hair care, such as washing and special cleaning products. During the intricate production of these additives, the different liquids will be compressed through more than a thousand filter panels, panels with a unit worth of around €1,500 euros. The manufacturing is done around the clock in 24h shifts. While this active production cycles frequently some of these filter panels break and as consequence the whole press-process has to be stopped. Time is money, so a fast exchange of the broken panels has to be done. Fast goes first means less documentation. Less documentation hinders quality control and missing control does hinder guarantee requests to panel suppliers and follow up of human or mechanical or process faults. In consequences the production cost did climb up dramatically.

A solution must be found which is easy to manage and cost-efficient and show up exact data to find out who is responsible and where to save cost.

After successfully finding the right partner to solve the logistic solution, Evonik appointed the German AutoID specialist PANMOBIL ( formerly ADT ) to do the job.

Because of the harsh environment with all the chemical liquids and no way of sticking any labels or screwing and thick plastic RFID packages to the panels, the specialists from PANMOBIL decided to implement sealed round RFID pills into the plastic panel material. While implementing an RFID solution cost for RFID tag, or pills is one part, the other often forgotten part is the installation, so the most easy and powerful assembling way was chosen. Drilling a whole into the panel material, inserting the RFID pill and sealing the top with silicon material. So all mechanical and chemical attacks can not damage the RFID sensor.

How to follow up the logistic procedure?
With the SCANNDY- transponder reading device from PANMOBIL one or two worker without any special skill will do the data collecting job by only passing by all panels and pressing the Scan-button. All presses, which have about 100 panels do also have one RFID tag at each side, so when scanning this tag at the begin of the panel – scan sequence and at the end of a panel-scan sequence, all collected data of a checked press will be pointed out to belong to the right press. After capturing all scanned data, the SCANNDY reading device has to be placed into a recharging and communication cradle to download the data to the panel – database.

The real cost saving point is the statistic to find out the week points!
PANMOBIL also implemented a very comfortable and helpful statistic software, which does allow Evonik to see the live data of any installed panel.

With this powerful database good and bad suppliers of panels can be found out and guarantee requests can be fulfilled. There is also a quality check for the press mechanism and a statistic about the various maintenance quality.

Fast pay back!
Because of eliminating suppliers- and internal handling problems, the investment for the RFID tags, the readers and the software did payback in 3 month.

About advanced PANMOBIL Systems GmbH & Co. KG
PANMOBIL is a leading manufacturer in the field of modular, compact mobile AutoID system components. The product range includes: Barcode Scanner (1D + 2D) and RFID (LF, HF and UHF Read/Writer) for easy operation, rugged use and low weight. PANMOBILs products, including the PANMOBIL Connectivity Packet (WiFi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 433MHz, USB or cable), allow data transfer to any platform without any additional cost.

SOURCE: PANMOBIL Systems GmbH & Co. KG