Viracon, one of the country's leading architectural glass fabricators, is installing an active RFID solution from AeroScout to track, monitor and manage glass carriers throughout three manufacturing facilities. The company has reduced the loss of its glass carriers and improved order throughput via real-time, wireless tracking of its production assets.

Viracon, a subsidiary of Apogee Enterprises, produces tempered, laminated, insulating, and silk-screened glass products and high-performance coatings. The asset-tracking project grew out of a Six Sigma initiative aimed at helping the company better manage its glass carriers.

"Previous to the RFID system, we used bar code scanners to scan the location of each carrier," says Todd Schelling, special projects manager at Viracon. "But the carriers move fairly quickly. If someone missed a scan, it was difficult to locate the carrier."

This cost the company time, as material handlers and supervisors searched the facility for the glass orders, and also resulted in material loss. Often, if a carrier couldn't be found quickly enough, employees would re-start the order from the beginning.

"We found that when workers would look for a carrier, they could only find it 60% of the time," says Matt Miesner, Six Sigma Blackbelt at Viracon.

The company began evaluating RFID solutions to provide real-time tracking of its glass carriers, and chose AeroScout because the company offered a robust, active RFID solution that could be deployed in the harsh factory environment.

At Viracon's Owatonna, Minn., facility, AeroScout's T2EB Industrial Tags are mounted on the glass carriers, and communicate over Viracon's Cisco Unified Wi-Fi network. The tags transmit status and location information as the glass is transported between the cutting, tempering and lamination stations. AeroScout MobileView software maps and displays carrier locations, and enables workers to search for specific customer orders. The MobileView API is integrated into Viracon's inventory management system, keeping the location and status of glass carriers up to date for inventory purposes.

Because the coated glass on the carriers can interfere with the RFID signal, the company mounted the tags near the top of the carrier when possible to increase accuracy. Access points are placed every 50 feet within the facility to ensure complete coverage.

"We were very happy to discover that our industrial solution with extended battery life provided a good solution for Viracon," says Amir Ben-Assa, industry solutions marketing director at AeroScout. "We've reached 15-foot accuracy with standard Cisco access points, which is very good for a harsh environment with a high ceiling."

Within two months of beginning a pilot project, Viracon was able to verify that the technology worked and was able to outline a business case. The company has reduced search time for glass carriers, eliminated carrier losses, and reduced manual tracking of expedited orders. This has delivered increased productivity, and eliminated unnecessary item reproduction and scrap, and based on these results, the company is now moving to a full production installation.

"This really reduced the amount of steps people had to take," says Miesner. "We've eliminated the manual scanning process, and removed human error."

"We went from between several hours to several minutes to find a carrier, down to less than a minute," Schelling adds. "It takes less than 10 seconds to locate a carrier, on average."

The Owatonna facility currently has tagged more than 2,200 carriers, with another thousand set to be tagged later. The company's other two facilities in Statesboro, Ga., and St. George, Utah, are in the process of having the RFID system installed. Once completed, 5,700 carriers will be tagged with the AeroScout equipment.

"Superior manufacturing processes require a deep view into the location and status of customer orders as they move throughout the production line," says Sheila Miesner, vice president process improvement at Viracon. "After implementing the pilot of AeroScout's solution we've been able to document drastically reduced time requirements for locating glass carriers, from several minutes to less than one minute. We anticipate this program will help increase production throughput, improve productivity and ultimately impact our bottom line when the program is fully implemented."

The company also believes the system can help increase capacity by reducing the amount of rework due to lost carriers, and could provide work-in-process (WIP) tracking benefits as well.

"Being able to find the carrier was one thing, but if we can use this to manage WIP holding areas throughout the plant, that will be a great improvement," says Miesner. "This is just a foundational improvement that we can build on."