RFID technology can easily be applied for applications that best fit your needs to track assets, people and product and to monitor, restrict and control movement. Not just enabling access, but also tracking and managing timed access. Monitor and control how long warehouse personnel can be in a freezer. Manage how long time sensitive items, such as food or pharmaceuticals are allowed out of a freezer. In each case send an alert before it’s a problem to your save products and the welfare of your personnel.
Reduce Violations in Restricted Areas
There are usually many restricted areas in manufacturing where certain people and certain assets may not be allowed for safety, security or production reasons. Assigning simple location management rules to assets, people and/or groups is an easy process using RFID technology and the right Location Management Software.
Assure People are at Their Shift Assignment
Assigning what operations and locations each person should be at for each shift should be easy. Once assigned, if the person goes outside of their designated location, then they may not be performing their most optimal job duties. This error causes unwanted, reduced productivity. With RFID and shift assignment software, alerts are sent right away when personnel are missing or discovered at an unassigned location.
Keep Assets at Designated Locations
In many cases tools, IT assets, and/or other equipment need to stay in an assigned location in order get the job done. If an asset isn’t there when the job is ready to start, it causes lost productivity and wasted labor while searching for the asset and getting it back to the right location. With RFID, an alert is immediately to the appropriate personnel when the tool leaves its assigned location. This allows for ample time to catch and prevent the asset from going too far before getting lost.
Stop Bottlenecks/Increase Production
When in production, if a job or item you are producing stays too long in an area, it could mean there is a problem. Or, if too many items stack up in an area it could also cause a problem. Especially, if you’re not aware that it’s happening. With RFID, you can get alerts as soon as one of these problems arise to enable you to act quickly and get your production back up to speed.
Reduce Chances of Contamination
In many areas of production, clean rooms and sterile environments are critical to your process. You need to prevent contaminated assets and/or people from entering the room. With RFID you can track everywhere an asset or person has been and prevent them from entering a clean area if they have not gone through a decontamination area first. Automate your doors to the RFID system and your clean areas will always stay clean.
Increase Safety
In many cases, personnel need the proper training before they can handle equipment or run a complex process. With the many dangers working with automated equipment and hazardous materials, you want to make sure your personnel are certified before performing these types of procedures. With RFID, you can alert supervisors right away so they can prevent potentially disastrous results.
Also, you may have personnel working in areas that are only dangerous with longer exposures, such as freezers or in areas of extreme heat, such as smelters. By timing how long a person is in the area, you can send an alert well they are in danger and quickly get them to a safe area.
Reduce Theft and Accidental Removal
With today’s RFID portal technology, you can catch any asset as it leaves an area or the building. In addition to knowing that “something” left the building, you will also know what left the building. Now you are sending informative alerts to security in real time, giving them a chance to catch the culprit in act and to know exactly who and what to look for.
Preventing Emergencies with Alarmed Maintenance
Sometimes you can stop an emergency before it happens. React fast when an emergency system is affected, such as situations where process temperatures or pressures rise above certain thresholds. Automatically alarm on process and safety sensor thresholds using SCADA technology, such as PcVue Inc.’s SCADA software. Once the alarm occurs you can use the RFID software to dispatch the closest maintenance engineer to fix the problem before it turns in an emergency.
React Quickly
No matter the location violation, visibility as things are happening gives your personnel the opportunity to address conditions before they become a problem. This helps to increase productivity while reducing unwanted losses. With RFID, it happens automatically and in real time. With the right software, you get alerted by emails, text messages or on screen and can view the results with your computer, phone or other mobile device.
Increase Productivity with Lean Manufacturing/Kanban
Supply chain efficiencies are a must for lean manufacturing. With the use of RFID, automatically send alerts upstream, before inventory levels get too low, enabling the process to continue to run smoothly. Kaizen business practices are now utilizing RFID to improve operations and increase productivity by self-regulating the process and automating the supply chain process.
Conclusion
Today’s RFID technology is ready now to enable you to implement a location management solution with full alarming capabilities to give you the information you need in real-time to make better decisions for production, safety, and loss prevention. Today, you can get all of this functionality out of the box and easily configurable.
Let InformaTrac help you to increase your awareness, enable you to present real data to your colleagues and managers, empower you to make better decisions and improve your overall success.
More About RFID
Advanced RFID Software
Off the shelf software, like InformaTrac Pro, makes it extremely easy to setup and use RFID. Advanced RFID software should allow you to easily manage locations, readers, antennas and associate people and assets to RFID tags. Zoom in and out of floor plans, view restricted areas, alarm violations, record complete movement genealogy, and easily display reports from anywhere on any device, including your mobile phone.
RFID Technology
RFID tags come in many different varieties to fit all types of assets. In working with all industries, tags are now available to work in almost any environment (extreme temperatures of heat and cold, constant exposure to sunlight, harsh weather and moisture, and the list goes on and on). RFID tags can also be easily printed with configurable information such as barcodes, ID numbers and even company logos. There are thousands of existing form factors that can be applied to your application.
The tags can be fit with lanyards, Velcro, or other mechanisms to easily attache them to an asset or carried by your personnel. Once an asset or person has the tag, that asset and person can be tracked throughout any area/zone including manufacturing facilities, office space, outdoor fields, tool yards, or anywhere you need to monitor.
Active RFID
Active RFID, such as InfinID’s V-Tag™ mesh network, makes it easy to place location tags through a facility. These tags are available in weather proof casings enabling tracking in remote areas such as fields or equipment yards. These location tags work on batteries and can be placed from a few feet to hundreds of yards apart.
An Active RFID system can be implemented quickly enabling you to track people in locations that you would have needed expensive GPS devices in the past. With Active RFID, you can track people anywhere as they move freely without the need for portal technology. Active RFID also works on battery technology which eliminates virtually all of the wires.
Click here or call (866) 619-7411 to get more information on RFID Software and Hardware solutions.
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