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In just a few months around ten million products should leave the production lines every year. The RFID system BL ident from Turck will be ensuring transparency on the new assembly lines and providing FDA-compliant traceability of each product.
At its German plant, a renowned manufacturer of consumable materials manufactures about 20 million units for process engineering every year. A large portion of the produced goods are currently exported to the USA. With its own plant in the USA, the manufacturer wants to reduce the capacity problems at the German manufacturing facility, and in future intends to manufacture on location in one of its largest markets.
The US facility is being planned at the companies own system construction department in Germany. Around 40 employees are involved in the mechanical construction, process engineering, special tasks and automation. The team has already gathered experience with RFID technology with the last production line. Using the radio based identification technology the high demands in terms of traceability will be fulfilled and the manufacturing operations will be optimised.
Cost-effective alternative
They were not happy however with the RFID system from a large automation manufacturer used up to now. “We were forced to look for an alternative because of the high data carrier costs” was the comment of the construction engineer responsible for the selection process of the RFID supplier for the US plant. “We quickly turned to Turck who had previously supplied us with data carriers when the original manufacturer was unable to supply them.” The attractive data carrier cost was only one of the reasons why the final decision for Turck was made.
“The BL ident system itself is also a very conclusive argument. It was not an unimportant factor that all the read-write heads were available as standardised sensor housings. This significantly simplifies installation and eliminates the need for inconvenient mounting brackets.” A further argument for the Turck system BL ident was the feature which allowed the mounting of the read-write heads at very small distances from each other. There are areas in the system where several read-write heads are installed in confined spaces. The minimum clearances required by the Turck heads are ideal here...
AUTHOR
Walter Hein
is the RFID product manager
at Hans Turck GmbH & Co. KG
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