Big Bag on track with RFID

Chemicals transported in Big Bags need to comply with global traceability requirements as well as legal obligations. These directives (such as GMP, FEEM and EU Directive 2008/43/EG) require visibility and traceability of the supply chain of fertilizers, food&feed grade as well as industrial products. Challenged by manual and partly inconsistent supply chain processes, our customer needed a system less prone for human error.

This chemical company worked together with Turck Vilant Systems in the implementation of a more technology-enabled operating model and introduced the use of RFID instead of barcodes, which are cumbersome to identify by sight. Using RFID enables the company to trace the origin as well as the content of each individual Big Bag.

Our customer, realizing that many supply chain tasks such as handling of big bags, package loss and manual tracking were likely to result in errors, decided investigated potential technologies that would help prevent errors. Tracing Big Bags with RFID was chosen as the technology it is easy to apply to Big Bags, allows automatic identification of individual items, yet requires no line-of-sight and offered a reliable system.

The end of each production line has been equipped to encode RFID tags to Big Bags. This automatically matches the RFID tag with the content of the Big Bag as well as manufacturing batch information. Furthermore, payloaders, forklift trucks and tractors are equipped with RFID readers.

Forklift trucks and payloaders are equipped with RFID equipment and software developed especially for forklift use. The smart algorythms detect for example which Big Bags are currently held on the fork of a forklift truck when they are moved around the company estate for warehousing purposes. Furthermore as the Big Bags are loaded for transport, again the smart algorythms are used to identify just the Big Bags that are shipped to customers, ensuring their traceability at this stage too.

The RFID implementation has provided our customer with a 100% legal compliance of the regulations as well as full control over end-to-end production and delivery process of each asset at any given time, from factory to farm. This chemical company can now can easily track, trace and if necessary, call-back individual big bags.