The company is a front-runner in building materials, operating around the world. It is well known for its finished cement boards, a high-tech mix of cement and fibres.
The company’s US-based Project Manager responsible for developing and deploying the Work-In-Process RFID tracking system across their 8 North-American plants shared an update about the project.
Challenges
In order for the solution to be successful, four specific challenges have to be addressed:
- Substantial losses occur throughout the production process: How to develop Work-In-Process visibility from raw material to finished products in order to keep track of everything?
- Most products come with paper labels that don’t stick well: How to avoid wasting so much time walking around products to find and read identifiers?
- The cement boards are cast into molds and baked in an autoclave, where all RFID tags failed: Is there a solution that withstands high temperatures, for how many hours, and at what pressure?
- The manufacturing environment is very dusty and busy: Would RFID be able to have a read without having to move everything?
Solution
The company found a number of promising options in the market that could meet their requirements for an RFID tag to be mounted onto the cement board molds and survive industrial autoclave temperatures. The products selected were then put through a battery of tests designed to replicate the company’s demanding manufacturing environment.
And in the end, it is the Xerafy Roswell Autoclave RFID tags that came out on top, ranking highest when it comes to high temperatures and pressure, shock resistance, accuracy and read range, wide read angle, as well as reliable mounting options.
The company has now decided to go ahead with its next phase, with extensive tests in the field, in order to finalise how best to track the molds, capture information throughout the production process, and eventually scale up the solution to all their production sites.
