Allied Signal's Truck Brake Systems
Sara Lee Knit Products
Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift Merger
Environmental Services, Ltd.
With Real-Time Warehouse Scanning, the Mark Group Can Find Its Products
Truck Brake Systems is a division of AlliedSignal's $7 billion automotive group headquartered in Southfield, Michigan. The company has recently redesigned its 150,000 square-foot parts distribution center in Huntington, Indiana, moving from a mainframe-based environment to a distributed client/server system, using 35 spread spectrum radio frequency terminal scanners for real-time transactions on the floor.
The new client/server system has considerable advantages over the old mainframe-based system, enabling location-level inventory, cycle counts, directed task management via the radio frequency terminals, and resource allocation and workload balancing. When the system is fully implemented, productivity is estimated to increase by 30 percent. Reduction in quality errors is estimated at 20 percent. From a capital standpoint, inventory cycle times can be reduced by 25 percent, and the range in decrease of inventory carried, space, equipment, and utility usage is anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent. AlliedSignal anticipates increased accuracy and substantial cost savings as client/server radio frequency technology's biggest benefits.
Sara Lee Knit Products, headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, manufactures brand-name apparel under the Hanes, Champion Underwear, Polo-Ralph Lauren, Spaulding, and Carters brand names. The company supports 13 textile and yarn plants and 35 sew plants located in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The company had been using barcode technology for over 10 years to track incoming raw materials and work-in-process inventory, and recently completed automation from door to door in five of its plants with a radio frequency-based automated shipping system. Barcode labels are applied to shipping containers and scanned on the dock with wireless terminal/scanners to build trailer manifests.
Previously, handwritten data for shipping was inaccurate, causing delays at customs for international shipments as well as in production schedules, but now shipping accuracy is very close to 100 percent. Sara Lee Knit Products found radio frequency to be more cost effective than hard-wired systems because plant equipment is constantly disassembled and relocated. Radio frequency saves on the considerable cost of rewiring, and by the year 2000 the company plans to use RFDC throughout its entire manufacturing process.
Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America, Inc. (MCFA), is a joint venture whose principals merged manufacturing operations in a new, technically sophisticated facility located in Houston, Texas. Since the merger, the Houston facility has tripled in size and output, daily turning out up to 60 custom-built forklifts in a variety of configurations.
Custom manufacturing on this massive scale requires stocking a raw materials inventory of some 23,000 parts. Prior to the merger, all WIP transactions were manually entered into the MAPICS MRPII system, usually within 24 to 48 hours. As a result, the one- to two-day delay in entering production data made accurate manufacturing-process tracking and forecasting impossible. The lack of timely raw materials inventory and production information also impacted customer service — no progress reports were available to customers until the product was finished.
MCFA determined that it needed barcode technology for faster and more accurate WIP tracking but needed wired terminals in production and wireless terminals in the distribution center where final modifications were performed on the forklifts and reported at location.
Fixed-mount terminals with wand scanners were placed at stations along the assembly line and at final finish, updating the MAPICS system throughout production. In distribution, portable radio frequency data collection terminals with integrated laser scanners are used to report final modifications and forklift locations, and the data is transmitted via spread spectrum radio frequency to the MAPICS system, using a custom-written conversion program. The forklift's serial number barcode is also scanned as it is being shipped, and the MAPICS system generates a shipping label with appropriate customer information.
The barcode-based data collection system significantly improved production tracking and speeded the reporting of consumption, as well as improving customer service. MCFA can now track work orders on the assembly line through each stage and provide customers with reliable information about work-in-process. The old manual system could not have accommodated any growth; the new system made the Mitsubishi Caterpillar merger, with its tripling of production volume, possible.
Located in Anchorage, Alaska, Environmental Services, Ltd. (ESL), provides environmental engineering, data collection, impact/habit analysis, and project management for a wide variety of private and public clients. The company specializes in remote, physically extreme environments that present unique data acquisition problems.
One of the most time-consuming tasks for field personnel at ESL is documenting the collection processes, writing down data such as location and content, often in the dark and at temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. About three years ago, ESL began to automate its data acquisition processes using portable pen-based data terminals and barcodes to track ID data on labeled sample containers and other items used in the field.
On a recent field project for a major American oil company near the Arctic Circle, ESL used three pen-based computers running Microsoft's Pen Windows software. Using pen input and electronic forms, personnel filled in location, type of sample, depth, type of analysis to be performed, date, and time, and with an interfaced wand scanned in prelabeled sample containers to attach the container ID with its record.
One obvious advantage of pen computing in the Arctic environment was that field personnel could enter data while wearing mittens. Pen input also allowed drawing a rough map of the location or relevant landmarks into the database via the digitized screen. Another advantage was the ability to immediately process data on the field.
ESL next plans to dump data from the surveying equipment to the pen terminal, enabling the generation of maps on location, which will result in even more accurate sample collecting. ESL estimates that automating data acquisition has increased field time efficiency by one-third. |
