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Articles - Publication Date 6.1.2003
Winning With Wireless
In manufacturing, going wireless means developing a strategy for tracking what matters most -- via technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), bar codes and machine monitoring. The results revolutionize the enterprise.
By John Teresko
Wireless accelerates supply chains, boosts revenue, empowers lean manufacturing and simplifies the task of locating and tracking inventory and assets. Wireless technologies also are supporting remote monitoring, predictive maintenance and machine control functions. In addition, wireless features are becoming an integral part of some products, adding value throughout their service life.
The challenge lies in researching, selecting and executing the most effective wireless strategy -- fast.
How fast? Consider how quickly wireless fantasy moves to wireless possibility: In a now-classic IBM television commercial first aired in October 1999, the camera follows a browsing retail customer who wanders from shelf to shelf stuffing items in his coat pocket. As he begins to walk out the door, a security guard stops him by saying: "Sir you forgot your receipt!" The ad's presumption is that wireless product identification technology had eliminated the need for conventional checkout lines! Today, retailers could use RFID to make that a reality.
To gain a perspective on just how ubiquitous wireless will become, consider the office of the future envisioned by IBM Corp., New York, and Steelcase Inc., Grand Rapids, Mich. Their evaluation project, called BlueSpace, uses sensors and wireless technology to create an interactive office environment that automatically adapts to the needs of the occupants. Steelcase says the intent is to provide an environment that facilitates productivity via employee comfort and personalization. Some of the BlueSpace components are beginning to enter the market.
The RFID Revolution
The Auto-ID Center for RFID opened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Mass., in 1999 and began field tests in 2001. The Center's self-described mission is to "assemble the building blocks to create an Internet of things." To accomplish that, the Center is designing an infrastructure and developing RFID standards to create a universal open network for identifying individual products and for tracking them as they flow through the global supply chain. (Vendors are now ramping up production of hardware based on the Center's specifications with the goal of having hardware and software commercially available by the fourth quarter of 2003.)
Like bar codes, RFID offers automatic data capture. But unlike bar codes, it is not a line-of-sight technology. The antenna on the RFID microchips transmits the identification information to a reader that converts the radio waves returned from the RFID tag into a form that can be passed on to computers that can make use of it.
While a bar code scanner has to "see" the bar code to read it (which means people usually have to orient the bar code toward a scanner), RFID codes can be read as long as they are within range of a reader. "That automates the process, increases data accuracy and reduces the cost of gathering information," says Kevin Ashton, executive director and an executive-on-loan from Procter & Gamble Co., one of the Center's three founders. (Gillette Co. and the Uniform Code Council, which administers bar code standardization, are other founding sponsors; today sponsors, both end users and vendors, number almost 100.)
The Center's goal stretches beyond cost cutting in the supply chain. It embraces the revenue-producing efficiencies made possible by using microchips and radio waves to automatically identify individual items down to and including the retail level. Those opportunities exist in every step of a product's passage to a customer. The benefits can start in the manufacturing plant and even can provide unique value while the product is in service.
For example, wireless is a key feature of an "intelligent" bearing announced by the Timken Co., Canton, Ohio. Now in test for rail car applications, the Guardian bearing "has the potential to detect, earlier than by current methods, damage to bearings, wheels and tracks that can lead<
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"The adoption of RFID into the mainstream of the supply chain is inevitable."
-- Tom Coyle, Matrics Inc.
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