Case Study: RFID-Enabled Kanban Parts Replenishment System

The client is a leading manufacturer of heavy industrial equipment as well as one of the largest equipment financing companies in the world.

One of their assembly operations utilizes small plastic totes to hold painted metal parts which will be consumed line-side in the assembly operation. When the parts are consumed and the totes emptied, an operator removes the empty tote and replaces it with a fresh tote full of painted metal parts. The operator initiates the replenishment process by barcode scanning the empty tote. This process includes taking the empty totes to a third party warehouse, filling it with raw unpainted parts, transporting it to another warehouse and where a third-party paint contractor paints the parts. The finished parts in the tote are then returned back to the assembly operation for line-side replenishment.

Since the barcode process was manual and labor intensive, errors were a fact of life. The inevitable mis-scans or no scans caused disruptions to the replenishment process. The lack of visibility to the status and location of the parts resulted in significant labor to locate, verify and expedite parts to insure the assembly operation would not be shutdown. When the client sought to automate and error-proof the data collection required to support the process, they turned to RFID expert Rush Tracking Systems who helped design and build a RFID-enabled tote tracking solution to support the Kanban replenishment loops for the work in progress (WIP) parts.