RFID solution tracks pallet movement at Asahi Glass

Asahi India Glass, one of the largest manufacturers of glass for automotives, uses specially designed metallic pallets to store and move the automotive glass across the supply chain, right from the production floor till the car manufacturer's assembly line. Thus, visibility of these pallets is imperative at all times, not only at the firm’s own facilities, but also at the customer's end.

Asahi faced a hugechallenge with respect tomonitoring and accounting for these pallets, since they are critical to production, are moveable, large in number and circulated in an open loop supply chain.

To improve pallet visibility, the firm partnered with Barcode India, which developed a turnkey solution for returnable asset tracking using Motorola passive UHF Gen2 RFID technology. Today, each pallet is mounted with RFID tags which carry a unique pallet ID number.

The gate portals are erected at strategic locations to capture the movement of the pallets. As a forklift carrying an RFID-enabled pallet passes through these portals for inward, outward or within facility movement, the tags are read by gate readers and processed by the application software. The pallet transactions are also captured at the customer's end at the time of delivery using hand held RFID readers.

This field information is uploaded to the central asset management application using a client module.
The asset management and tracking application maintains pallet inventory levels, status (in transit or at location), category and model. The system generates timely alerts and reports that have enhanced visibility, reduced shrinkages and improved overall pallet utilization.

Today, there is high visibility and accountability of movable assets. Substantial cost savings have been gained by the firm due to reduced losses as the firm can now exercise total control and map the assets within their open loop supply chain.