Moilas Oy convinced, following a RFID pilot project

RFID technology is making strong headway amongst processing industries and in monitoring the flow of consumer products. A bakery company, Moilas Oy, tested the applicability of RFID technology in monitoring its cold storage. The pilot project exceeded all expectations.

The SysOpen Digia team exploring new technologies is involved in a project with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, spearheading new applications for RFID tag technologies. One of its projects was the pilot trial for Moilas Oy, implemented by SysOpen Digia in collaboration with TeliaSonera and Trackway Oy.

“In the Moilas case, our challenge was the sub-zero environment. All freezer produce is taken to a cold store with a temperature of either –25°C or –28°C for a minimum of 48 hours. Our task, with the help of RFID, was to implement real-time monitoring of bakery crates taken into the cold store and of those retrieved from it”, explains Technology Consultant Rauno Kainulainen of SysOpen Digia. The pilot project ran for a couple of months in the summer of 2006.

Control of Moilas Oy’s store logistics is based around bakery crate labels, with barcodes containing product details, such as the production date, batch number and the best before date. The problem arises in cold storage, when rime forms over the bakery crate labels, making it difficult for the scanner to read the barcodes. Likewise, the manual scanning of the barcodes causes shortcomings in the accuracy of the data, as some of the crate labels are missed in the scanning process.

Hundred per cent data accuracy

It was decided that these challenges would be solved using RFID technology. “We utilised the latest scanner and software technology, and built a middleware system which did not require a link with Moilas Oy’s production control system. The system functioned independently during the course of the pilot trial”, Kainulainen explains.

In the production area, barcode information from the bakery crate labels was scanned using hand-held terminals, and some of the data was saved onto a RFID tag. The rest of the information was saved into SysOpen Digia’s iSuite integration application which can ‘talk’ to the hand-held terminals.

Fixed RFID scanners were installed at the cold storage door. As crates were taken through the door, the scanner read and identified them in a fraction of a second. When the produce was delivered to customers, another scanner registered the products out of the stock control system. The entire registration took place in a fully automated way without any manual procedures.

“The results were excellent. We achieved 100% data accuracy - that is, all the crates were registered”, says Director Petri Anttila of SysOpen Digia.

Development Director Arto Sepponen of Moilas Oy is also happy. “The purpose was to test whether RFID technology is suitable for a sub-zero environment and the monitoring of crates in our logistics chain. The trial reassured us that it works. Thanks to this technology, we are able to gain considerable benefits from product control and traceability.”