Food manufacturer blends internal benefits with RFID compliance
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
The new year brought a milestone in radio frequency identification (RFID): by January 1, the top 100 suppliers to Wal-Mart Stores, Bentonville, Ark., were to be shipping RFID-tagged cases and pallets to the retailer's North Texas region.
But alongside the consumer goods giants already tagging product for the region are smaller suppliers like Jack Link's Beef Jerky, a midsize manufacturer of meat snacks. Since Jack Link's wasn't one of the Top 100 suppliers under Wal-Mart's January mandate, moving forward with RFID also required internal benefit, says Karl Paepke, VP of operations for the Minong, Wis.-based company.
That benefit, says Paepke, will come from better visibility of outbound finished goods, and by placing reusable RFID tags on totes used in the manufacturing processes to achieve automated lot traceability and work-in-progress tracking.
"Currently we bar code our finished goods, but we haven't used data collection to drive our supply chain," says Paepke. "With RFID, we could leap frog the bar-code era, and move from starting line to finish line in one fell swoop."
The first step was shipping RFID-tagged cases and pallets to Wal-Mart's North Texas region, starting with orders for one-pound bags of beef jerky. The phase went live last September, using readers from SAMSys; RFID smart labels from Avery Dennison; RFID printers from SATO America; RFID integration software from Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS); and consulting from MBS integrator ABC Computers. Jack Link's uses the Navision ERP suite from Microsoft, and is one of the first users of MBS's RFID enablement for Navision.
According to Paepke, these vendors made RFID easier. "When we heard about the mandates," says Paepke, "we went back to ABC Computers and challenged them to make sense of RFID for us, and what our objectives should be. When we saw what it could do for our customers' visibility, we realized it could bring similar benefits to us."
Next up, Jack Link's will deploy RFID on its Minong plant floor, and in receiving for lot traceability and work status tracking. The company considered conventional bar coding for such tracking, but according to Paepke, "we saw that RFID would be the emerging technology for this."
Jack Link's has seven plants and uses a third-party distribution center, and during the next several months, will begin RFID tagging and reading at these facilities. Once they are ready with RFID, says Paepke, Jack Link's will have real-time inventory visibility. "We are hoping to shrink our supply chain, both in terms of time and inventory levels," says Paepke.
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