Work in Progress Monitoring using RFID

Toronto, ON, September, 2006 - The ability of any enterprise to effectively monitor it's manufacturing facility and work in progress? has been an elusive or costly endeavor. However, with the introduction of RFID technologies and its application to the manufacturing process such initiatives are now well within reach.

RFID by its very nature has the ability to read tags or labels over distances and multiple or batches simultaneously. Other RFID initiatives provide the ability to write data to a tag multiple times.

A proposed solution to accurately monitor work in progress on the manufacturing floor of Aerospace companies can be described as follows:

Each manufacturing operation step is installed with an RFID reader.

The unique ID for each reader provides the enterprise with a granular representation of the shop floor.

Each piece of work or component is affixed with a tag (or in the instance of palletized small pieces, the pallet can be tagged and read and the software would determine the pieces used per operation)

When a piece arrives for machining or processing the tag is read and the unique ID is time and date stamped and sent to the database.

The workflow software will then provide the means by which the work in progress can be monitored and associated with specific job orders.

The ability to see work in progress at any given time will have beneficial results in that sales people will be able to communicate more accurate ETAs on placed orders. Production managers can use the information to assess production bottlenecks and validate the accuracy of lean manufacturing initiatives. To learn more, please visit www.gaotek.com