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09 November 2012

Swire Coca-Cola HK and DilinxRFID Won Bronze Award in Best EPC/RFID Implementation and in Most Innovative Use of EPC/RFID at HK RFID Awards 2012

Swire Coca-Cola HK and Changzhou DilinxRFID Technologies Company Limited - RFID Traffic Control System (TCS) won Bronze Award in Best EPC/RFID Implementation and Bronze Award in Most Innovative Use of EPC/RFID at the 5th Hong Kong RFID Awards.

Background

Swire Coca-Cola HK is Hong Kong’s leading soft drink manufacturer. The company operates 17 production lines and employs nearly 1,400 employees, producing more than 60 million unit cases annually. The company is also a supplier of syrups and carbon dioxide (CO2) cylinders for post-mix soft-drink dispensing machines to major restaurant chains.

Business Challenge

Swire Coca-Cola HK wanted to explore how it could improve the efficiency of its distribution operations, optimizing the use of its existing vehicle fleet and loading facilities. The company identified truck queuing and loading procedures as one area of potentially substantial improvement. The procedures for truckqueuing and loading had been in place for over a decade and were completely manual. When a delivery truck arrived back at the company's loading facilities, a security guard would pass a numbered card to the driver, indicating how many vehicles were in the queue.

As this was the only information drivers would be given, the drivers had to rely on their experience to estimate roughly how much time they had to wait in the queue and how much more time they had to wait for loading to be completed. At the same time, because the system was manually operated and truck assignment was only recorded on paper, there was no active monitoring of the system to allow management to track operational metrics. This meant that management lacked visibility and evidence to support any changes in operation to increase efficiency.

RFID Solution

To address this challenge, the company launched the Traffic Control System (TCS) project with DilinxRFID to automate truck queuing and improve monitoring of loading operations using RFID technology.

The TCS project team began by conducting thorough user requirement discussions as part of a process to identify the key requirements of the system and define the scope of work. From these discussions, the team identified the projects top requirements as allowing the free flow of incoming and outgoing traffic at the entrance to minimize the disruption of the new system to the users. In addition, the tracking system must be EPC Global Gen 2 standard compliant, in line with the CO2 canister management system established the year before. Because antennas must be mounted on ceiling, the team noted that the tracking system must have a long read range. Lastly, the tags associated with vehicles and drivers had to be placed inside the vehicle for security.

The team evaluated a range of solutions, including passive and battery assisted passive (BAP) systems. It concluded that only the EPC Global Gen 2 UHF BAP solution could meet all its key requirements.

After a successful pilot, installation of the system was extended to the entrance and other loading bays and software deployed to provide real-time tracking of trucks and loading times.

Benefits

The TCS system has had a positive business impact. Among the key operational metrics tracked by the project, it was notable that the average number of trucks loaded per working day and loading bay utilization increased by 8-10%, while average loading time and queuing time decreased by 13-14%.

From a qualitative perspective, TCS made truck queuing and loading a more robust operation, eliminating human errors and allowing the security guards to focus on real security concerns. In addition, the system enabled the collection of real-time data, providing supervisors with immediate insight into operations so they could make informed decisions quickly. The scope of the project will now be expanded to more loading bays and vehicles.

The project RFID Traffic Control System (TCS) has won two awards of the GS1 Hong Kong RFID Awards 2012 - Bronze Award of Best EPC / RFID Implementation, and Bronze Award of Most Innovative Use of EPC/RFID.

Find more details here.