RFID based Tracking solution for a Drums manufacturing company
Customer Information
The company is a manufacturer of special purpose drums which are used for storing various chemicals, vegetable oils, food products, agricultural products and other items. The company has facilities at multiple locations. They have multiple associate companies who offer services for reconditioning the drums. The drums are used by various end customers. They were also looking for a solution that will help them manage the inventory of drums at each site as well as retrieve the material usage history of the drums. Additionally, the mobile software solution should support barcode and RFID technologies.
Problems Faced
The drum manufacturer, reconditioning companies and end customers needed a solution for tracking the drums inventory as well as usage history. The drums were manufactured by companies at multiple locations and they were shipped to end customers. After using the drums for a period of time, they had to be sent for reconditioning. During its life cycle, each drum travels to end customers for storing various items and then sent to reconditioning companies. Before any drum is used for storing an item, it is important to know the history of that drum such as the material that was used earlier, the date when it was manufactured, the date when it was reconditioned and the next due date for reconditioning.
The end customers need to have inventory visibility and availability of various types of drums (that will meet their usage requirements) at other locations. Additionally, the usage history of drums should be available to all. They were using a combination of legacy application and excel spread sheet based system and it was difficult to use.
Solution Offered
XCELtracker based asset tracking solution was offered for this project. XCELtracker maintains the central database of all drums that are manufactured by the company from their multiple facilities. The application can be shared by manufacturers, re-conditioners and end customers. Based on the user type, functionality and access are restricted by the system.
When a drum is manufactured, it is given an unique identity. Each drum would be tagged with barcode and RFID tags. As soon as a drum is manufactured, visibility of that drum is made in real time to all relevant users. All operations performed by the users at various locations are maintained in the centralized database. The system maintains the historical details of all drums like the usage history, items stored, reconditioning done and the name of the end customer. As soon as a drum is due for reconditioning, the system automatically generates an alert. When a drum is shipped to the end customer or re-conditioner, the drum location gets automatically updated.
Before the drum is used for storing a product, user must scan the drum using the handheld device and enter the product type that they would like to store in the drum. The system will check its history and verify if it is okay to store that item / material in that drum. If that material cannot be stored in that drum, the system generates exceptions and alerts the operator. If the user is allowed to store the material, the data gets updated in the central system.
System provides various types of reports like inventory, product storage history, reconditioning history, manufacturing history and usage history.
Benefits
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Visibility of inventory, status, locations and availability of various types of drums at all sites
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Visibility of the usage history and reconditioning history of all drums.
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Reduction of costs
About Indusmation
Our Principle has been a leader in offering advanced mobile enterprise software solutions using barcode/RFID technologies since 2001. Indusmation specializes in offering solutions for applications such as Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, Asset Tracking, Maintenance Management, Healthcare, Warehousing, Distribution etc. Our mobile solutions are supported in Windows Mobile devices as well as Smart Phone platforms such as BlackBerry, Android, iPhones, Nokia and others. Indusmation team has excellent experience in offering industry specific mobile solutions to process industries like Cement, Steel, Paper, Oil-Gas, Power and Mining. Our solutions help to extend the ERP right to the smart phones and empower users to work more efficiently and help companies to improve the bottom lines. Indusmation offers a full spectrum of Consulting Services, Software Development/Customization, Hardware Configuration, System Integration, Implementation Services, Training, Post Implementation support and Maintenance services. For additional information please contact at info@indumation.com visit our website at www.indusmation.com for additional information.