Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008 by
Gregg Maggioli
Check out this cool website at www.RFIDTags.com. It has a great listing of RFID Tags. It is highly ranked and offers excellent technical RFID support.
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Posted Saturday, January 19, 2008 by
Gregg Maggioli
I want to take a break from my usual posts and take a little time to brag about a project we just completed. BlueBean, headquarter in Indianapolis, Indiana, was selected to provide RFID products and RFID services to General Electric (GE)
Aviation. As we all know GE is HUGE and what most of us call a pilot would usually constitute a full implementation for most companies. GE Aviation implemented RFID at one location to evaluate reducing the size of its work in process (WIP). GE Aviation produces jet engines worth sometimes millions of dollars each. The manufacturing and assembly of these engines takes place all over the world so it is easy to understand the size (cost) of their supply chain. The challenge for GE was how to reduce the size of their WIP while still maintaining on-time shipments.
RFID to the rescue! By installing BlueBean’s dock portals equipped with Alien RFID Readers at all dock doors and at choke points between departments provided production planners better visibility and more timely information. Keep in mind that most engine parts they deal with cost tens of thousands of dollars so they have great interest in just-in-time inventory control. It is a fine line the production planners must walk between having too much inventory and starving production. The visibility RFID provides allows the planners to better match WIP with production needs. With their WIP worth hundreds of millions of dollars company wide even a small improvement would be worth millions of dollars.
Keep tuned in for a follow-up post when the results of the pilot are available. I would expect sometime by mid 2008.
Aviation. As we all know GE is HUGE and what most of us call a pilot would usually constitute a full implementation for most companies. GE Aviation implemented RFID at one location to evaluate reducing the size of its work in process (WIP). GE Aviation produces jet engines worth sometimes millions of dollars each. The manufacturing and assembly of these engines takes place all over the world so it is easy to understand the size (cost) of their supply chain. The challenge for GE was how to reduce the size of their WIP while still maintaining on-time shipments.RFID to the rescue! By installing BlueBean’s dock portals equipped with Alien RFID Readers at all dock doors and at choke points between departments provided production planners better visibility and more timely information. Keep in mind that most engine parts they deal with cost tens of thousands of dollars so they have great interest in just-in-time inventory control. It is a fine line the production planners must walk between having too much inventory and starving production. The visibility RFID provides allows the planners to better match WIP with production needs. With their WIP worth hundreds of millions of dollars company wide even a small improvement would be worth millions of dollars.
Keep tuned in for a follow-up post when the results of the pilot are available. I would expect sometime by mid 2008.
Posted Thursday, January 17, 2008 by
Candi Carlson
Back in the beginning of 2006 BlueBean, the RFID solutions company, acquired the online store RFIDSupplyChain.com. To get the word out we decided to use a multi-faceted marketing approach including press release distribution and possibly some television time as well.
As most marketing or public relations specialists know distributing a press release has become much easier since the advent of online distribution services and emails. Getting on television without paying for advertising has been and continues to be a different story! The best advice I can give is persistence, persistence, persistence. By the way, did I mention persistence?
After a few weeks of persistence (did I mention this was key?), we finally were confirmed to appear on Inside Indiana Business with Gerry Dick. It was a great forum to make our announcement and a great way to promote our company to Indiana businesses.
Posted Tuesday, January 15, 2008 by
Gregg Maggioli
When I was sitting watching my beloved Indianapolis Colts lose their first round of the NFL playoffs I started losing interest and starting of thinking about how RFID will transform the world we live in. If you think about the billions of dollars that have been spent on ERP, accounting, CRM, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and many other IT systems they all have one thing in common. They rely on humans to input data.
Recently BlueBean completed a RFID project for GE Aviation and I was speaking with one of their Six Sigma Black Belts. We discussed that RFID is perfectly suited for taking the human (variability) out of the process. RFID allows for real world objects to communicate directly with those expensive IT systems with no human interaction.
Ok, lets take a Healthcare example - consider a mobile asset management system in a hospital. The only way to track a mobile asset (i.e. IV pump, heart monitor...) in the past was for a person to manually keep track of where these assets were located. So if maintenance was required on a certain IV pump someone would need to physically walk around the hospital until that pump was found. It was too difficult and error prone to manually track these assets. Now consider RFID.... every mobile asset has a active RFID tag or passive RFID Tag and would provide location information back to a centralized mobile asset management solution.
Consider hospital supplies - each item (supply) would have a RFID tag and when these items are placed on a smart shelf the backend inventory system will know inventory levels in real time with no human intervention.
As RFID equipment prices drop and the performance improves more applications will become viable.
Recently BlueBean completed a RFID project for GE Aviation and I was speaking with one of their Six Sigma Black Belts. We discussed that RFID is perfectly suited for taking the human (variability) out of the process. RFID allows for real world objects to communicate directly with those expensive IT systems with no human interaction.
Ok, lets take a Healthcare example - consider a mobile asset management system in a hospital. The only way to track a mobile asset (i.e. IV pump, heart monitor...) in the past was for a person to manually keep track of where these assets were located. So if maintenance was required on a certain IV pump someone would need to physically walk around the hospital until that pump was found. It was too difficult and error prone to manually track these assets. Now consider RFID.... every mobile asset has a active RFID tag or passive RFID Tag and would provide location information back to a centralized mobile asset management solution.
Consider hospital supplies - each item (supply) would have a RFID tag and when these items are placed on a smart shelf the backend inventory system will know inventory levels in real time with no human intervention.
As RFID equipment prices drop and the performance improves more applications will become viable.
