RFID to take Ford’s revolution further
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July 30 would have been the 130th birthday of Henry Ford, the man who revolutionised the automotive industry, and thus set the wheels turning for the rest of manufacturing. Brian Tinham reports
July 30 would have been the 130th birthday of Henry Ford, the man who revolutionised the automotive industry, and thus set the wheels turning for the rest of manufacturing.
When Ford envisioned the creation of a “motor car for the great multitude” he couldn’t have known how enterprise IT today would allow ‘tailor-made’ cars to be produced every time.
By tracking all of the parts needed to produce a car, manufacturers can efficiently customise each vehicle to its end user’s specifications. Seems we’ve reached the age of ‘the great motor car for the individual’.
Worth noting though that to achieve that requires a lot of systems and a lot of automatic identification. Lee Shorten, head of the European manufacturing division for barcode and RFID company Symbol Technologies, reckons that while barcodes have to date played a massive part in making that happen, RFID – as an intelligent bar code that not only holds more information, but is always looking for a reader – is the next step.
“RFID is currently well placed to fit into the automotive industry’s mobility,” says Shorten. “However, current RFID solutions are being dumbed down in an attempt to minimise implementation costs, to such an extent that RFID tags are currently just slightly more advanced barcodes.”
He sees current technology, including barcodes, as part of the ‘mobility enterprise’ – providing an infrastructure to manage all of the business processes in the supply chain.
“The barcode has become part of this wider infrastructure, with mobile devices designed for data capture integrated into the entire automotive industry. We call this process CM2, the process of capturing the data, moving the data throughout the enterprise and managing the infrastructure to distribute the data from the point of capture to the point of use.
“We see dual technology as being where the automotive supply chain is moving towards. RFID will obviously be playing a major role in 5—10 years, but we see that this role will be complementary to barcode solutions.”
