PLM – RFID Combined Solutions to Solve New Business Issues

PLM – RFID Combined Solutions to Solve New Business Issues

Increasing awareness on customer safety and environment awareness has influenced some governments to create new legislations like TREAD act, EU food safety legislation, End of Life Vehicle legislation etc. These legislations ask the companies to track its products from inception till its retirement. In case of any accidents, companies should be able to recall the products as soon as possible. These regulations along with existing product lifecycle issues are divided into these five critical issues category:

• Product recall
o Tracking and tracing issues ( EU food safety legislation)
o Early identification of product failures ( every product recall costs around £39000)
• Right part at right place at right time
o Different components in the same assembly line ( Just in time)
o Last minute design changes
o Sequence load and installation errors
• Service and maintenance – Repair shops
o Misidentification and record-keeping errors
o Servicing multiple versions of same product
• End of Life Vehicle issues ( End of life vehicle act for recycling 95% of product)
• Asset management

RFID technology can be used to bridge the last mile between the actual products and the PLM solutions and this can remove the manual errors and delay in information sharing. RFID tags are used for storing the tag identification number. When RFID readers read this id number, this can be directly sent to PLM systems to get whatever information needed as well as to store the necessary information in PLM system.

Some of the PLM players have already started developing solutions with RFID. For example, mySAP PLM has already developed RFID enabled solution for enterprise asset management. Agile has also developed a solution for tracking and tracing raw materials for one food manufacturer.

Detailed analysis of RFID technology and current PLM solutions states that there is a huge opportunity for PLM-RFID combined solutions that can bring tremendous benefit to the organizations.

Introduction

The need for customer safety and environmental friendly products are increasing every year and new legislations and acts are enforcing companies to track their product throughout its lifecycle. In the current scenario, ensuring the right component gets into the product is not enough, it is necessary to track till its end of life. This paper analyses such critical business issues, its impact for the companies and how RFID combined with PLM solutions can solve those issues.

What is PLM – Product life cycle management?

CIMdata defines PLM as a strategic business approach that :

• Applies a consistent set of business solutions that support the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product definition information
• Supports the extended enterprise (customers, design and supply partners, etc.)
• Spans from concept to end of life of a product or plant
• Integrates people, processes, business systems, and information

Three core or fundamental concepts of PLM are:

1. Accessing and using product definition information in a universal, secure and manageable manner
2. Maintaining the integrity of that product definition and related information throughout the life of the product or plant
3. Managing and maintaining business processes used to create, manage, disseminate, share and use the information.
While information includes all media (electronic and hardcopy), PLM is primarily about managing the digital representation of that information.

What is RFID – Radio Frequency identification?

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify people or objects. There are several methods of identification, but the most common is to store a serial number that identifies a person or object, and perhaps other information, on a microchip that is attached to an antenna (the chip and the antenna together are called an RFID transponder or an RFID tag). The antenna enables the chip to transmit the identification information to a reader. The reader converts the radio waves reflected back from the RFID tag into digital information that can then be passed on to computers that can make use of it.

The big difference between the bar codes and RFID is bar codes are line-of-sight technology, that is, a scanner has to "see" the bar code to read it, which means people usually have to orient the bar code towards a scanner for it to be read. Radio frequency identification, by contrast, doesn’t require line of sight. RFID tags can be read as long as they are within range of a reader. Bar codes have other shortcomings as well. If a label is ripped, soiled or falls off, there is no way to scan the item. And standard bar codes identify only the manufacturer and product, not the unique item.

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