Issue #212 | Oct. 29, 2009 | by Byron Blackburn

As manufacturing stirs from its economic slumber of the last 18 months, requests for “Lean” projects to track, trace, and locate products in industrial environments are increasing.

Reduced resources are what drive these RTLS project requests.

Most questions I first hear expect that besides software and tags, the hardware alone will address all the goals and requirements. Programming aside, for most RTLS solutions it is not the cost of the hardware, but the infrastructure required to support it, that catches project managers by surprise.

Yes, RTLS readers, tags, software and servers cost money. Don't get blindsided by the “true costs” of these deployments, which reside in the power connections, network runs, switches / routers, wireless access points, mounting hardware, NEMA Boxes, and all the other equipment required to make these tools work.

The good news is a few RFID products on the market the last couple of years address this issue for the end user.

I found a product that is revolutionary in this arena. Recently I selected this impressive solution for three different customers. I handle the integration side and project management and they were the easiest to deploy I have ever used. They also have the lowest required infrastructure footprint of any product I've been involved with. [You'll need to hang in with me to the end to find out whose product it is.]

Project 1: All metal, all the time
The project covers a metal manufacturing facility and shipping area. This is an all metal, high-bay building with overhead manned cranes, about 300 meters wide and over half a kilometer long, stacked full of sheet and coiled metal. A tough environment in anyone’s book. Worse yet, there is no network in the production area and limited power runs. The only places with any kind of network were three supervisory offices spread across the facility.

Now each of these offices has an external antenna mounted to it and a reader set safe and secure inside. The entire locating area is covered by small, 900 MHz active RFID (battery-powered) locator devices bolted to saddle clamps, on I-beams or buried and epoxy-covered in the floor.

This location grid was deployed in less than two days by local staff. Each asset gets a RTLS asset tag slipped in a plastic sleeve and stuck to the load. As the loads move, the asset tags read the locator devices. When they stop moving they use up to eight of these points to finalize the resting location. Quick and simple, works like a champ, and all with only three readers, needing no additional infrastructure.

Project 2: Adding Real Time to JIT
This is an automotive facility with “Just in Time inventory” stored in trailers parked around the facility. This JIT material is sequenced for delivery to the correct dock door when required, to support the assembly process. Locating each of 500 trailers and managing their staging is critical to production flow, but was getting difficult with reduced manpower.

The yard surrounding the facility has no power or network readily available. To operate over this large area without needing to trench up the yards to run power and network eliminated a huge infrastructure investment. Location devices placed on fences, poles, and stakes driven in the ground to create a location grid. Locators are placed every third or fourth door depending on spacing, and each trailer receives a bolt-on tag.

With one week of deployment time, all 500 square acres of yard and 60+ dock doors could be covered with just a few readers placed on the corners of buildings and reading tags out past 3000 feet. Not one extra power or network connection was required

Project 3: Some tags powered by their hosts
A Transit Authority had more than 500 busses and vehicles to track in multiple buildings and parking yards which hadn't really been upgraded in the last 50 years. Everything was scheduled on spreadsheets as were maintenance records. After months of cutbacks and layoffs finding where a vehicle is parked is sometimes an all day task.

I had to pull together and blend many different systems. Adding RTLS to their WAN using the RTLS' standard SQL database worked easily. Each building and parking yard is laid out with locators to a defined grid and one or two readers depending on size. Each vehicle is equipped with an asset tag (some powered by the vehicles to extend battery life) with a project deployment timeline of less than two weeks. Basically, power connections are all that was required at each remote site and anyone with access to an intranet web browser can log on and find a vehicle quickly, see its history, status, and availability.

Your payoff for reading this
The vendor – RFind of British Columbia, Canada – is relatively young, but managed by RFID veterans with an outstanding understanding of what RTLS is. I wish I could take credit for all this; but I must take my hat off and give credit to the RFind team for a simple software interface and limited infrastructure that may just make RTLS affordable for you.

For more on the software issues, check my column in RFID Street #206.

Byron W. Blackburn is the principal at Blackburn Global and specializes in vendor relationship management and helps clients strategize and manage their implementations. www.BlackburnGlobal.com